LightningPaul

My colleague has a couple of really old but cool looking radios. They work with those good old radio tubes and even today they still turn the radio frequencies from the air into nice sounding music. I made this one for the site MacroDay theme Radio. So I needed a close up of a radio. One day I'll shoot this radio fully framed, so stay tuned :-)


TECH-INFO: This one is also made with my recently bought 35mm macro lens. You can focus so close with this one. For lighting I used one off camera speedlight flash on a light stand. The light is softened using the Lumiquest Softbox III. The latter is very small, something like an A4 sheet, but when used for macro it's apparent size is pretty big. Despites the soft light it was not easy to position the flash because of the many round metal parts, shiny glass cover and black parts which could use some direct reflections to get lit well. After many trials I positioned the flash at the left side pointing a bit down to the tuner panel and set at the height of the speaker section, which is above the tuner panel and rows of top buttons.
With Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) I developed the RAW file. I mainly pushed the clarity to enhance the mid tone contrasts. To amplify the darker contrasts I pushed the blacks and fill light, which preserves the very dark ones but lightens the other dark tones. Finally in Photoshop I desaturated the upper and lower parts (so not the tuner panel) by almost minimizing the vibrancy and increasing the saturation a bit. It gives some sort of vintage look. The buttons are slightly enhanced using a masked curves adjustment layer in soft light blending mode. At the end some vignetting is added. No cropping is done.