LightningPaul

It has been several weeks since I participated the VFXY weekly themes, so I had to come up with something. This weeks theme is Mobile Devices. Not an easy one. Especially if you try to be a bit original. So far this is best I could find (if you got any better ideas, don't tell me because I'll be angry on myself). It's a close up of my wife mobile phone, shot with a macro lens. The lighting of the keypad makes it pretty cool.


TECH-INFO: In general I used a bunch of strobist techniques in combination with blending in Photoshop.
The mobile phone is lit in two ways. First, an exposure of 1/10s for the white characters on the keypad (this light comes from the phone itself) together with a bulb hanging on the ceiling which lights the black keys. The latter light has a very warm tone, you can see that at the reflections of the keys and metal parts. Second, the background, which you don't see here, is lit by a very little softbox powered by a speedlight flash. Actually the phone is laying on the softbox. The result is a totally white background, this makes it easier to select the mobile phone during post processing.
To make the actual background more interesting I took a simple shot of the electronics of a hard disk device, lit by just window daylight. In Photoshop I blurred the electronics using Gaussian blue and I set the opacity of the background layer to 55%. Finally I blended it using the multiply mode. I just had to mask out the mobile phone.