This is a companion blog to a lot of images that I am posting to my "A Picture A Day" blog and to my Flickr account.

The intent is to document how I am processing and manipulating my original photographs to get final images that I am proud of.

Final post in A Picture A Day, and the original photo.

This was shot with my Olympus point and shoot while sitting at my desk late at night. The lighting was from a halogen desklamp tilted sideways and very close to my face to get a dramatic feel and strong highlight in my eye. Unfortunately, the camera didn't get the white balance even close.

In Adobe Lightroom I first adjusted the temperature to get it close to real. I then bumped up the exposure a bit (+0.33) and brought up the blacks a lot (15) which made my hair fade to black. I like contrast.

Continuing with the contrast, I adjusted the Tone Curve pretty radically, a trick I learned from the built in Direct Positive preset. I brought the Highlights and Lights way up (+62 and +20), and the Darks and Shadows way down (-25 and -27). Pulling the Darks down accentuated the blue eye quite impressively. I don't mind blowing out the highlights on my face, I think that helps put the focus on the eye, which is the most interesting part of any face.

Finally, I took the Vibrance down (-25) to soften the colors a bit. This gave me a stong contrast without accentuating any of the ugly parts of my skin, except for the bitchin' scar (insert vanity slur here).

As a last step, I used the spot remover to get rid of the light in the background and a few unsightly hairs hanging off my ear.

It would be silly to have an photograph of all my cameras without the one taking the picture in the shot. I could have used a mirror and flipped the image, but I opted for a composite shot instead.

I set up a small stage in the garage with a black felt background, lit by a couple of video lights. On the stage I positioned my three cameras, then replaced the Canon with a 2x4 of approximately the same size to act as a placeholder.

With the Canon on the tripod I framed the shot, then took a picture of the set up with the Olympus so that I would have an image on the Olympus screen. I shot off a few frames and also took a picture with the lights off and a longer exposure to get a brighter version of the image on the Olympus' screen. I put markers on the felt at the edges of the frame (as seen through the viewfinder) to use as reference for the next step.

I replaced the 2x4 with the Canon, and put the Olympus on the tripod. I lined up the focal point as closely as I could with where the Canon's focal point was, and zoomed in to about the same image size as the Canon. Click. Bracket. Click.

I chose the two images with the closest exposures and loaded up Photoshop. I layered the three images (including the lights off bright screen photo), and adjusted the size and position of the Olympus image to match the other two. This worked surprisingly well. Then using the erase tool, I erased through the top Canon photo to bring the Canon into the image and bring the brighter screen in. I then adjusted the color and contrast of the Olympus picture to match the Canon image.

A little cropping and final color correction in Lightroom, and voila.

I wanted to create a beauty shot of my father's 16mm Bolex camera. Trying to find a unique angle to show it off with was my first challange. I wanted it to have that "Old Hollywood" feeling of looking up into the sky - the camera needed to feel bigger than life. So I first stood it up on a kitchen counter and moved around snapping pictures. I probably shot over 50 snapshots trying different angles, POVs and focal lengths. I'd shoot a couple dozen, review them on a large screen and shoot some more. I finally found the angle I wanted.

You can see from this image that I also rotated the chosen image to get exactly the angle I wanted.

I then built a "set" for the camera on my workbench in the garage. I had a roll of leatherette that matched the texture on the camera left over from another project, so that was draped to create a background. I stuck a bolt through a 2x4 and had it come up through the fabric to mount the Bolex on, making the camera appear to stand on its own.

I hit it from the side with a soft light, and from the top with a very bright key light, masking both so they wouldn't light the background. The beautiful starry flares came for free. Using a printout of the test image as a guide, I adjusted my camera and tripod to match the angle and view as closely as possible.

Here's the original photograph that came from that session.

I wish I took a picture of this whole set up - it looked pretty kludged together, but it worked great. The only view that counted was the one through the lens.

In Photoshop I did some cropping and then had to fix the background. My background wasn't big enough to fill the frame, so the garage door filled it instead. There was also an annoying reflection below and to the left of the camera. Using some cut and paste and the clone stamp those problems were fixed. At this point I also ran a sharpening filter on the camera but not the leatherette.


I pulled the saturation all the way down to black and white, and then added a #81 Warming Filter back onto it to, yep, warm it up a bit. (See image on left.)

Finally, I pulled the brightness and contrast up pretty agressively (+23 and +25) to get the feeling I wanted. I don't mind the blown out foreground, in fact I think it helps to punch up the camera.


I'm really happy with this image. It delivers the feeling I was hoping to get and I think it does a great job of honoring the camera and our family history along with it.

The final image: