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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dangerspouse" data-source="post: 754165" data-attributes="member: 46690">I've been in quite a photography funk the last couple of weeks. I don't know what it is, but I just haven't felt like pulling the camera out. However after work yesterday I forced myself to stick a lens on the ol' Nikon and have a go at this week's challenge. Maybe immersing myself in the process would get me over the hump.The theme this week was "Yellow". I didn't want to do the stereotypical yellow fruit composition, so I searched for other things around the house that fit the category. My wife races motorcycles, and one of her dirt bikes is bright yellow. I thought of posing her on it in a yellow-streaked helmet and matching jersey. But then I saw a few other objects that looked more interesting. One was a tiny little rubber sheep my wife keeps on her desk as a hand-squeeze stress reliever. The other was a heavy duty outdoor electrical extension cord. Both were bright yellow.I started with the sheep, which looked funny head-on done high key on a white drop cloth. In fact, I'm kinda sorry I deleted those pics now. But at the time I decided it needed more elements, so I found a yellow parts basket and flipped it upside down to look like a fence and placed both on a green woolen blanket that I bunched into rolling contours. It still needed something though, so scouring around I found my old Monopoly game and snagged the wheelbarrow piece from it. And voila, a yellow sheep escaping from a toy farm:[ATTACH]352961[/ATTACH]That took a bit more work than I thought it would. The tray and the sheep were both the same shade of yellow, so they almost blended together. But I had this set up in a light box, and by moving and angling the baby spotlights on the outside of the box I was able to direct some shadows and shading to differentiate them (I think I may have made the sheep just a tad too bright while trying to do that, though). Then it was just a matter of seeing what different apertures produced. Wide open was way too shallow a DOF, and anything much over f/7 made the tray look obviously like a tray. I settled on f/7.1 as the sweet spot.Then to the extension cord. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as I saw it, so the only thing was to figure out the setup. I decided to go low key so the yellow would really pop. I hung my black drop cloth over the kitchen table window - the same table you see my wife sitting at in my previous post - and turned all the lights out. I went with a single soft box pointed right at my face, since I wanted it kind of dramatic with shadows and highlights. Then it was just a matter of holding the cord with my hand high enough up so it curved into a snake shape, but not so high up that it was in the shot. With the other hand I fired off the IR remote trigger on a 2-second timer. At less than 1/50th of a second I had a lot of blurry pictures as either my head, the cord, or both moved, but I did finally get several keepers. (9-point AF-F mode.) In PP I had fun changing the color of my eyes and teeth. The hat is naturally that color. This was the first one I processed:[ATTACH]352967[/ATTACH]But then I realized I preferred this shot, after initially dismissing it because I cut off the bottom portion of my chin and the cord wasn't as long:[ATTACH]352968[/ATTACH]It just seems like a better composition overall, so that's the one I entered. Even though the hat brim cast more of a shadow and made the eye change less obvious, I just liked it more.I realized as I was doing all this just how much fun I was having trying to figure all the elements out in order to get the result I wanted. Hopefully it was enough fun that it got me out of my rut!</blockquote>

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