Perfume Advert & Lens Flare

After doing the perfume advert a few weeks ago and not being completely happy with it, I revisited the examples I had drawn down. I liked the lens flare effect of the one below and decided to emulate it in the studio while we were working on hair lights.

Looking at the image it would appear that most if not all of the effect is done post production in Photoshop. I wanted to try and replicate it though as much in camera as possible.

As you can see the end result was not as I had hoped for so concluded that the only way of getting the desired effect was to enhance it in Photoshop.

Finished Image.

Think I actually prefer my version to the advert above and my next move will be to re-shoot with a female model and work on a new perfume advert with this technique

Spinney Wood

We are now on to colour film. I went to Spinney Wood to shoot with two cameras. The intention was to compare directly the difference between regular 35mm colour film and transparency that has been cross processed. Still waiting to process the transparency but I like this image so much I printed it out already. Obviously to put on here I have scanned the print. I also did a little bit of digital enhancing with curves.

Fuji Competition

A digital version of what I want to try and do on film. So so so much easier digital I think.

I shot a perfume bottle in the studio as part of shooting products/shiny items but I also wanted to play with it a bit and make a perfume advert. Not a professional in Photoshop so  tried only to do something pretty basic. I looked at a few examples (below)

While my image is nowhere near as good as these, for a first attempt I quite like it. 

Re-shooting the Wine Bottle

After the disaster of shooting the wine bottle on film, I re-shot on digital at home with my home studio. Still not completely happy but it is a lot better.

Product Shots

Fiona and I decided to try out a little bit of product photography in the studio. Not having anything really to hand, we went with my watch. Using the portable lights and the media studio we set up our lights, used a Nikon D800 with 105mm macro lens. The macro enabled us to get really close to the subject. We set the camera to f22 for maximum sharpness and metered the lights. Using two lights with shoot through brollies we also surrounded the watch with white reflective boards. 

I opened the image in Photoshop and started a few little changes. Firstly I adjusted the levels on the whole image and then selected just the face and did the same. I also did not like the angle of image so I then rotated it and used the distort tool to give a better over all image.

As the watch was not new and was a little grimmy (as watches get), I did a black and white conversion and slightly adjusted the brightness slider. Over all I am quite pleased with the result.

Shooting Colour Film

Shooting for the first time on colour film I was using Agfa Vista 200. First of all I shot a few sky scenes for later use when we are going to be learning how to insert a sky into a different image. I then wanted to do some light trails. I have never shot light trails before, not even on digital so I decided to bracket a few images to see how they turned out. The metering was coming out at around 15 secs so I shot at 15. 20, 30 and 10 secs. looking at the contact sheet below, there was not a huge difference at those exposure times anyway. 

The next thing I wanted to do was try my hand at product photography. I took a wine bottle and a glass into the studio and had a go.

 Above is the contact sheet that I produced from the reel.

I decided to print out the light trails first. This was the first one and was exposed for three seconds. It came out rather bright and flat. The image below was exposed for eight seconds and I feel is too dark so I then did another for six seconds. Once again I think it is too dark so probably five seconds would be better.

The product shots were another story all together. I wanted to emulate the shot on the right. A good example of rim lighting, which I came across while researching studio techniques. I set the camera up at f8 and 1/125. Using three lights I set the one to the left metered at f8, the one to the right and front at f5.6. From the result though I can see I made the fatal flaw of not ensuring all the lights fired.