I have seen stuff like this before, but I wanted this myself....but with something universally recognisable..

single AF540FGZ wireless flash two reflectors used to show off the texture of the metal.

any comments/critiques welcome

[Digitalis]

and here is another one...i'm just working with getting the water to become more of a focal point.

oh yeah the lens used is a FA77 f/1.8 limited with a Hoya +2 close up filter.

[kevinschoenmakers]

Wouldn't this be better in colour, with the fire? (or is it something else?).

Also, I think it would give a more pleasant view if you turned the lighter 180 degrees, so the point of interest is on right side.

[Digitalis]

Wouldn't this be better in colour, with the fire? (or is it something else?).

Also, I think it would give a more pleasant view if you turned the lighter 180 degrees, so the point of interest is on right side.

I'm not using colour at the moment because i'm trying to simplify things..


apparently the idea isn't quite working...that isn't fire mate, it's water.

[kevinschoenmakers]

If the idea is that you want to have water coming out of a lighter, then no I don't think it's really working. Simply because it looks as if it could be fire, and I wouldn't expect it to be water.

[Digitalis]

I think I should do something with the background that interacts with the water to make it a bit more obvious. Surrealist images are rather hard to create because there has to be something from the real world that gets transformed into the surreal. But the object that gets changed has to be instantly recognisable otherwise people won't notice.

the use of colour might help with this, people often take black and white images more seriously than colour ones for some reason. I might also change the angle..

[Digitalis]

here's another image....

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Last edited by Digitalis; 08-31-2010 at 05:22 PM.

[foxglove]

I really like this idea! The second one works best for me so far, it looks enough like flame that it tricked me just long enough to get that "d'oh!" moment when I figured it out. It's the condensation that gives it away; I wonder if it could be a tiny bit more obvious, or maybe you need a little on the body of the lighter.

You're probably right about doing something with the background, although I really like the simplicity as is. How about just lightening it up a notch, say to about 80% grey?

If you do try colour, I think you'll need to be pretty subtle about it - to me, anyway, the charm of surreal images such as this is that you get fooled at first. If you glance at it and say, "Oh, water coming out of a lighter, cute," it's not interesting. If you glance at it and say, "A picture of a lighter, big deal... um, hang on a sec, that's water!" it sticks in your mind.

Great pp, by the way, it looks seamless. Not an easy task!

Julie

[Digitalis]

here's the colour version, I used a gradient with a hardest cut-off I could get it...looks like I will have to hand colour it, but I like the effect.

[foxglove]

Hm... the colour version seems brighter in general. I wonder if you need to tweak your B&W conversion. But I do like the colour, too bad I can't go back to never having seen it before and see if I still get the d'oh effect!

On a totally unrelated note, did you notice that we've got "the same" username?

Julie

[Digitalis]

On a totally unrelated note, did you notice that we've got "the same" username?

Julie

yeah I did though I have the botanical genus name.

[kevinschoenmakers]

I much prefer the colour version over the B/W ones. It looks better and I think it works better for the effect you're trying to create.

[Mikeru]

The colour one does look pretty great, but I wouldn't give up on the B&W either. I think your white point may be a liitle off, in particular on the body of the lighter. It looks very grey and uncontrasty. Try giving it a boost to see if it gets some of the impact that the colour version has. The amount of lighting vs shadows looks best in the third B&W, I would say.

Enjoyed seeing the progression here.

[Digitalis]

here's my more refined effort, It was really hard to get even illumination on the background for the two shots to match...

I also increased the Magnification of the diopter I used to get the shot of the water "flame" from +2 to +3 and as a result the aberrations were a bit extreme for the FA77 Limited.

[foxglove]

Hm... the colour's fine, but the water looks a bit too flame-like now, at least to me! Maybe it needs to be that way, but I wonder how it would look with droplets rather than the streaky effect. I'm really enjoying your experiments!

Julie