Macro Mouse

So someone made a really creepy mouse onto of an Oreo cookie for Valentines Day. It was made out of a chocolate covered cherry and a Hershey's Kiss. Kinda cut, but it had red eyes so it felt like it was staring into your soul. So I ate it. But not before taking a picture of it of course.

Looks evil right? Those little, red eyes staring at you unblinking. I do like the ears though...nice touch.

Anyway, I used a soft box to light this little guy. Since the soft box was only 1835683645 times bigger than the mouse, the light is very soft and lovely on him. The specular highlights in the water and gel eyes is just gorgeous. This is why it's more flattering to use huge light sources on people. It makes skin look soft and smooth, instead of textured and wrinkled. The soft light still brought out texture in the moisture, but there are no shadows cast that make it look ugly.

When shooting macro, I like to put the light source as close as possible. This makes the light as soft as possible, as well as making it as bright as possible. This is true for all photos actually, the closer the light, the softer and brighter it will be. You can use this principle to your advantage if you only have a TTL flash or don't want to adjust power. You can move the light closer or farther to adjust brightness. With something like a soft box, you can bring it in really close for soft light, or move it back to get harder light. It's so easy and works wonders.

I shot at f8, 1/80, and ISO100. Strobe was at 1/128 power. I had on a +4 macro filter to be able to get close enough to fill the frame with the mouse.

In Lr, I raised the clarity and actually made the image a little darker. For once, I over exposed it. HA! It was missing something, so I decided to play around in Ps a bit.

I duplicated the layer, blurred that layer, and set it to overlay. This gave the mouse it's rich color and shadows. It left the highlights alone for the most part, but just made everything else lovely. I added in a background as well, but to give it some depth. I don't know if it works so well, but I didn't really feel like working on blending that much. I think a softer mask would have done the trick.

All for tonight, see you tomorrow.