Perks of the trade

Another weekend of average weather, but that is OK as I promised to do some bottle shots for a winemaking friend so he can sell his wines on line. It is technically fun doing these shots as getting consistent light on a curved surface without any unwanted reflections can be,,, interesting. And I can’t help myself and end up always going overkill.

4 studio lights, 2 tripods, 2 scrims, a tape measure, a spirit level and a large lump of polystyrene foam. Nothing to it really.

Each bottle gets at least 3 shots for each image which get composited in Photoshop so that the bottle is evenly lit and the label is nice and clear. Once set up it is pretty quick to do each image. It is just the hour of work to put it all away so that I get my dining room back which is the annoying bit. :-) And the payment for this, I get to drink the wine of course!

Backbeat wines GSM!

Taking advantage of a nice road on a bleary day.

Was determined take some pictures this weekend after bad weather and work commitments had got in the way for the last few weeks. The weather did not look like it was going to come out to play unfortunately, but remembered a spot 30 minutes from home that I had noticed when exploring a month or so ago that a flat overcast day would work with.

Just a short bit of road but with amazing overarching trees that were intertwined, framing the road really nicely. Pulled out the 100-400 to get the reach and compression I wanted (ended up shooting at about 160mm) and a pretty slow 1/15 of a second shutter speed to push the aperture to f11. Other than that no filters or anything special.

The final image was cropped down to 5x4 (still trying to decide if I should have made it square and lose a bit of the road in the foreground) and then into Lightroom for some base adjustments and to warm it up slightly. Photoshop for some luminosity masks to add brightness and contrast to the branches and saturation to the greens. A bit of a vignette to focus the interest down the road and finally a light Orton affect to add a bit of glow to the trees and leaves, masking out the road and foreground. And that was it. No day is bad when you can get a nice picture like this.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM, 158 mm ISO100, F11, 1/15