LightningPaul

Once I saw a very fascinating image of a head from a sewing machine. This was the trigger for me to make my own version though this one is quite different. Since you don't find them easily in Belgium, I waited til I was in Poland again. Many people over there have one at home. So I just had to grab my camera at the right moment.


TECH-INFO: I used my Lensbaby with screw-on macro lens, since I had no real macro lens at that time. The head is lit with a speedlight powered shoot through umbrella. This soft light made it easier to light bigger parts of the metal. I'm not sure anymore but I think I bounced a second speedlight on the wall behind the head. With the high shutter speed I killed all ambient light. I shot several RAW files from different angles. This was the most appealing and sharp one. Focusing with the Lensbaby is not always so easy.

I really love the use HDR techniques to rebalance the light and enhance details but this time I wanted to do it another way. Post processing is fully done in Photoshop. Originally I went for a color version. I love B/W images but when processing my images I mostly cannot throw away those (beautiful colors). This time the monochrome version lets you focus more on the shape and the metal than the color version which I had first.
I used a masked adjustment layer of the curves tool in soft light blending mode. The mask is orginally fully black but I paint white color (on the mask) where you have the metal parts and rope which need contrast enhencement. Then I added some vignetting. Afterwards I converted it into B/W. On top I used a color balance tool layer to color the shadows more red and highlights more yellow. This gives a split toning effect. So in the end I really had to put some color in the image anyway :-)