Trashy Landscape

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Dec 25, 2012

The purpose of these images was to make an otherwise common boring everyday item somewhat beautiful and appealing.  The set up was mostly simple, (just resolving around one light source) and the procedure became more about selecting shape and shadow from the overall image.  The overall colours the camera saw were far behind what I imagined and made great results.

What you are looking at is a plastic garbage bag suspended over a bed side light, (60w from memory) :P   The set up looked somewhat like this

I used a Pentax K10d, iso100, shutter of 1/15th or 1/8th and a Pentax M 50mm lens at f8, or f11 from memory.

I was laying down on the floor about half a meter away from the source, and set to f8 to ensure enough depth to cover the 20cm odd depth of the plastic bag as it hang over head.

The result was a lovely surreal landscape of an otherwise piece of trash. I think I did indeed use that bag latter to line the contents of my rubbish bin.   The randomness of the item was just wonderful to explore.  There was detail and shape every which way you looked. The point being, that wondrous subjects are but everywhere and it’s not so much about the subject,  rather then what you dam well choose to do with it.

Editing involved a modest tidy up in Gimp to remove some sensor dirt, but then became a matter of selecting the most pleasant from the captures. A la a redish version of above..

The change in colour from the purple to the red was a result of the in camera white balance being set from cloudy (ala orange) to flash a la blue.

It was great fun to extract these colours and shadows from such a simple set up, I just wish I was but 0.00002cm high so I could explore this Alien terrain.

- tromboads