The previous post was a couple days in the making, mostly because once I had the concept, I had to find the time to stage and shoot all the pics, but they were all done earlier today. And the tag about not being Photoshopped is absolute truth – I used GIMP instead. In fact, only one of them didn’t involve compositing; I’ll let you determine which one it was. In the process, I learned a couple of techniques that I’d known how to do in Photoshop but not in GIMP, so just reapin’ the benefits here.
A couple of little notes, because what’s a blog without meaningless trivia?
The first image looks the worst – I’d originally shot the lens and smutphone in the same frame to match lighting, but the phone was a little too far out of focus, so I reshot it. The composite could have been better, but you know, it was a nonsense post… The same quarter was dubbed into two different frames, radically resized, for ‘scale.’ For the speakers and the earbuds, I had to edit out the wires. The ‘HD Projector’ is actually just my angle-finder, a right-angle attachment to the camera eyepiece for those difficult shooting positions, propped up on a random piece of plastic. You need to look close at the ‘CBD Oil,’ if you haven’t already. This one probably took the most time, because of the curved text. The ‘flask’ was probably the easiest edit just to remove the power cord. I really do have a knife that largely looks like that, and stays in the car. My pocketknife isn’t anywhere near as goofy-looking. The selfie gun… well, I don’t have any firearms, and won’t, and this was the closest I could get (and yes, I do have a foam dart gun that the cats love.) Better, the ‘camera’ is some old MP3 player that I had, with the selfie-image dubbed in. All of these were self-shot, by the way, because I was alone when I had the time to play with the post. If you were sharp you noticed the lighting is all wrong. The cooler was the beginning of the difficulties, to make that text angled properly. It’s easy enough to paste in any text that you want, but distorting it to reflect the apparent angle that it should display takes a little more. Mostly, I had to find the damn option in the menu, but all four corners of the text layer had to move independently to make it look right. You can see the remote in my hand for the shirt shot. But believe it or not, I’ve never studied modeling at all – that’s pure instinct. The nondescript software bundle actually shows Walkabout Studios in all their/its glory, vertical mouse, drumsticks, R2-D2 mug and all. But the screen was dubbed in, and I had a very eclectic collection of HTML, Javascript, and BASIC commands in that text – you just can’t make it out, dammit. And the cutting board was almost ‘real,’ in that I was making duck soup at the same time that I was shooting the images, so I just added a couple of spinach leaves. The bloodstains were of course added in – I’m a much better cook than that – but the overturned wine glass kinda got lost in the mix. Just didn’t put in the effort that I should’ve.
So okay, it was all just lame sarcasm, a lot of effort for a joke, but thinking of the shots and the materials was a good exercise, or at least I consider it so. Had I been tasked with doing serious shots of this nature, naturally a bit more effort would have been put into the settings, lighting, and, you know, ironing, but for an idle idea, it came together fairly nicely. Every photographer should try some staged humor shots from time to time.