When I decided that I would like to redo my work’s stylised logo as a real photo to present as a framed print as a farewell gift for a friend I said to myself it shouldn't be too hard. It seems that is what I always seem to say to myself before a couple of days of my weekend disappear into studio work. Yeah, I never learn.
Composite of two images, Canon 5DIV, EF24-105 F4L, 82mm F11 1/125, Elinchrom 100W strobe
The basic set up for each of the two images was not that difficult. Essentially a single strobe through a scrim backlight to produce a high key image with black cards to the sides and above to give definition to the edges of the glass and the flask, as well as shading to give each image depth.
The first challenge was that while two parallel cards worked fine for the glass, for the conical flask they had to be set at an angle that matched the sloping sides of the conical flask or the edge shading looked uneven and weird. Lots of experimentation and redos to make it even close to right. For both images each subject also had to be right in the centre or it just didn’t work. Needless to say even though it sounded easy it took a lot of time and redos with minute tweaks to get everything right.
Amazing what you can do in your dining room with some card, a strobe and some masking tape (the bottle of excellent Scotch didn’t hurt either).
Once the basic images were done it was onto the computer for the next challenge, getting the markings to disappear from the flask as I wanted it to look clean and unmarked (I won’t even talk about the amount of time I took cloning out dust specks from both glass and the flask). In the end cloning out the markings just didn’t work well enough, leading to too many artefacts in the subtle shading. After a few hours of mucking around a much simpler way of doing it occurred to me so it was back into the studio (well, dining room) and retake the flask image with the markings to one side. After lots of mucking around getting the positioning right, back onto the computer, duplicate the image, flip it horizontally, and mask one side so that I essentially reflected the image down the centre and the markings disappeared.
Some final tweaks to the balance the light in the two images and then the compositing in photoshop only took a few minutes. Back into light room for a few final white balance and clarity tweaks and then onto the printer. Printing high key images is always a little of a challenge as any colour cast shows up badly, but not too many test prints were needed. Then into a nice frame (eventually winning the battle against stray cat fur which is always a challenge in our house with any white object). Have to admit I was pretty pleased with the final result and so I think was my friend.
Always a relief to actually see the print looking good, especially in A3.
And the end result ready to be wrapped :-)