My Sleeping Bag

For Christmas, I got this awesome new sleeping bag from Sierra Designs. It's some new kind of down that is hydrophobic so it doesn't get all soggy and mushy when it gets wet. At least not as much as regular down. So I decided to make a little ad for it today. It does actually work great and I can't wait to use it again soon!

To start, I had to get a picture of the bag. I set up a white cloth on the ground (so it'd be easier to mask later) and laid the bag on it. I lit the scene with an umbrella at each end, in line with the bag. I wanted fairly soft light while still having some texture to the bag. The umbrellas were about waist height and set to 1/4 power.

Camera setting were 1/200 (no ambient allowed), f3.5 (widest aperture on my 18-135 lens), ISO100.

First thing I did was mask out the bag in Ps. I experimented around with blue colored backgrounds, but I settled on white. It just looked cleaner.

I needed water to be splashing around the bag...I'd love to do this in real life, but then I'd get everything wet and so that wouldn't be too great. So instead I settled for internet water! Pretty lame and unrealistic but what can you do at midnight in a dorm room? For the time I had it worked out pretty well. I managed to find a .png file that had it's transparency still with it, so I didn't have to deal with taking out the white background that's usually with splash pictures. Like I said though, the water still looked a bit fake because the droplets were kinda messed up from taking out the white background. Look at the picture and you'll see what I mean.

Once I had my water, I warped it a bit so it curved around the bag. I had to actually clone a few bits so that the original edges weren't shown. The bottom left side of the water didn't actually exist in the picture as it was the edge of the frame. Easy fix.

I had my water and bag, but they didn't match. The water was too light blue where the bag was a darker blue. To fix this, I added a color overlay in blending modes that darkened the blues of the water.

To finish it up, I grabbed a couple of logos off Google and popped them in. I did have to re-color one of the logos because it was grey instead of the green I wanted. I just added a color overlay in blending modes of the green I wanted so solve that.

Here's the final result. Time from start to completion: 1.5 hours. Shoot time: 10 minutes. Edit time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Time eating yogurt: 10 minutes.

That's all for today! See you tomorrow!