Thanks for coming back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey has brought me. The last few days have been damp, rainy and cold and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I decided to do a little photography experiment. My wife had a floral bouquet that she was about to throw out and I decided to use that as a photographic subject before the trash can received the flowers!
After taking a few photos, I thought it would help if I added some fresh flowers to the base. I took a few more photos and then decided that maybe it was time to try using a flash to see what type of effect that would create. The result was that all the flowers were equally illuminated, and this was not the effect I was interested in achieving. After trying a few more shots and not getting what I was looking for I decided the best way to approach this would be to use Photoshop to make some edits.
In Photoshop I made selections of the base and tabletop of both a photo with and without flash. And using a mask on both photos I edited out some of the oppositely illuminated flowers. And then merge the resulting two photos and the result was a photo with the dead flowers being somewhat dark in the fresh flowers being somewhat bright. This was close to the photo I was trying to achieve. My next step was to change the background of the photo to eliminate my kitchen wall! I found a photo that I’ve taken of some plywood and so I use that as the background by first lightning the photo by using a blend mode and then adding a very light orange adjustment layer; the net result is background that looks something like wallpaper.
Since the right side of the photo look like that was the direction of light I decided to try and use a drop shadow to create a shadow. This attempt did not turn out as well as I would like but it is a first attempt and this blog is about documenting my attempts at learning photography and using post-processing software. Here’s a somewhat finished photograph. I say somewhat because I save the file as layers and hopefully in the future as I gain more skill I can go back and re-edit this photo in a manner that is more artistic.
Please come back to visit www.dansepourdeux.com to see if I’ve made any progress in becoming a better photographer!
C'est la vie 