Thermos

Today's photo didn't go exactly the way I wanted.

I was playing around with using specular highlights again to light this thermos I have. The idea was to light a big area and have the thermos reflect that lit area back to the camera. In hind sight, I should have use my BIG reflector as diffuser for one of my strobes. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow.

So here the out come of today. Not too bad, but there's too many highlights and craziness going on on the thermos itself. I want to try to get a more even, rich, red tone with only a new strong highlights.

The set up for this is kinda crazy. There's a soft box of to camera right and about a foot from the thermos. That's a 560ex III set to maybe 1/32 power. To my left is where it get weird. I wedged a giant piece of mat board in-between my shoulder and the wall (this was taken in a pantry above a sink btw.) So with the mat board wedged in there, I had my left hand holding another 560ex III (at 1/32) pointed  up at the front of the mat board. My arm kind of went under the board and my wrist twisted all funky to get the flash pointed right. 

Camera setting were: f4, 1/125, ISO 100. 50mm lens on my 7D. I wanted fair depth of field on the thermos but the background and foreground to be a bit soft, so I used f4. 

The post in this was a lot of spot specific editing. The weird fin shaped reflection in the lid was originally yellow. I painted over this in Lr with a brush set to reduce saturation and then tone it more blue to match the other metal of the lid. It worked out better than I expected. 

For the lettering, I had to select the last three letters and paint them with 50% opacity of the color of the third letter. This brightened them up and made the whole name stand out. At 50% opacity I maintained some highlights and shadows so it made it look more real and not painted over. 

Finally, I duplicated the layer, set that duplicate to overlay, and made a vignette out of it. I did this by making a circular gradient from black to white on a layer mask so that the overlay layer only was seen on the edges around the thermos. 

That's it for today. I might try this picture tomorrow again, or maybe I won't. Either way, see you tomorrow.