January 6: Tiles

 

Taking a cue from one of the photography emails I get daily i decided to play with word tiles.  Considering i have a few sets of these laying around from the kids I didn't think it'd have too hard of a time finding a few to make something.

The first task was what should I spell out from things I have around the house.  I was in the mood for potato soup and I remembered that there was a whole bag of potatoes in the cabinet.  It was around 12:30-1pm on a sunny afternoon so I knew I wanted to use natural light.  I picked out a potato and had to move the fridge to find the last tile i needed for SPUD and grabbed the cutting board as I didn't feel the counter top would have looked as well as I wanted it to.

I had my Pentax 50mm f/1.4 on the camera and I went with that as its a better piece of glass than my kit lens.  I got as a close because I wanted to crop within the camera and keep as much of the count as I could.  The hardest part for me with this was composing it.  I had the potato where I wanted but the tiles were a problem.  I wanted it to sort of look like they were put there by a child but every time I placed them they looked well, placed.  I finally settled on what you see above.  The sun coming through the kitchen window gave me more than enough light and I like the shadow that it casts on the far side of the potato. 

I changed the angle of the shot and took about 8-10 shots.  I kept coming back to this one after I was done and this was about the third picture I took.

In editing I didn't really have to change much, I bumped the tone curve a bit for the highlights and brought out some of the shadows.  ISO was 200 so no worries about noise.  I played with the colors a bit so the tiles would stand out a little more.  I knew I had to do a bit of cropping but realized the upper right corner had a bit of the counter top in it and i couldn't remove it without removing more of the picture than I wanted.  I hopped back to the Photoshop side and clicked the "clone stamp" tool.  I had used it before and I have gotten some decent results from it.  Well as you can see, you can't see the counter top in the picture.  Of all the aspects of the photo, it's one of the parts I'm most proud of. 

Would I have done anything differently?  Maybe I could have gone from a higher angle and placed it where there was a little more light coming through, from maybe the living room windows.  Its an ongoing process but I've been pleased with the photos I've taken this year so far.

There's no "B" side for this one as I couldn't really find another angle or way I wanted to present this.

Tonight's film: Terminator 2: Judgement Day.