Week 2: Fragile
Hah... Rules eh... Made to be broken. Leave it till Wednesday - broken. Only use prime lenses? - Broken.
In my head, I had the concept of "Fragile - pick something most people would see as strong and show it broken to prove frailty is relative." After a windy Friday night, I went out with camera hoping to see debris. There wasn't any. I'm also aware that the next couple of weeks are going to be busy at work so my weekly time to "take and edit photos" will be severely curtailed. When I found myself with time on my hands yesterday, I got cracking with some eggs.
Eggs are fragile. Simple theory. However I wanted to show them in a different light. I've done this sort of thing before (I think in my 2010 52 attempt?), but had many problems with it, so this is a reshoot of that with lessons learned. That's a good thing right?
Week 2: Contact I by
Harlequin565, on Flickr
The timeline here is backwards (1st shot is bottom right, last shot it top left) and my setup shot is off my iPhone. First I took a pic of the eggs in boxes which isn't so bad when cropped (click through to Flickr to see the rejects). After finding 2 eggs of similar size and colour (our chickens all produce different coloured eggs) I gave them a wash and stuck them to the kitchen counter with strategically placed blu-tack. Positioned deliberately to get the light in the direction I wanted it.
Unfortunately, my longest prime is 35mm and the problem with this is that you have to be close to fill the frame. Being so close meant that even at f16, the front egg was in-focus and the back egg was blurred. This was the problem with previous 2010 attempted shot (I think) at f1.4/50mm which meant a really narrow DOF. For this shot, I ended up having to pull the camera right back and attach the 55-200 and zoom in. At high numbered apertures, a tripod was essential because of really slow shutter speeds. (My chosen shot is a 1.5 second exposure @ 200mm, f22)
Initial shots were over exposed, so I turned it down a bit to get the exposure right, then had to move things around a bit to get the eggs in the right place. The last 2 shots were my "keepers", with shot 1 having the front egg in focus and shot 2 having the read egg in focus. I blended them in Photoshop afterwards. Once I'd finished, I added more chicken related paraphernalia to the scene and pulled back a bit. Had to take multiple shots so I could shift my narrow background across the frame. Again, the resulting stitch is on my Flickr page and it's not a winner
Once I had my final image I flipped the image horizontally (I prefer reading L to R), and did 2 crops - one at 6x4 and one at 5x3. I preferred the 5x3 crop and ended up adding a bit of colour tweakage to the last shot. One last check in LR survey mode before settling on my final image. The right hand images in the contact sheet below show the different processing technique. Original on top, tweaked below.
Week 2: Contact II by
Harlequin565, on Flickr
So this is it. The final image. A bit cheeky and a bit of fun. Does it need an NSFW tag? It's just a couple of eggs?
Week 2: Fragile by
Harlequin565, on Flickr