Mah Shoo, Brah

Now that the snow is pretty much melted in Bozeman (but it might be back, who knows it's Montana), I thought I might continue yesterday's theme and do a light painting with my shoe!

I love these shoes, they're La Sportiva something or others, they're trail/mud/snow running shoes. They have 1/4" spikes on the bottom, which give unbelievable traction in almost any conditions. I have never slipped with these shoes, even in solid ice. They also have a big Gortex gator that comes up and around the ankle, which keeps snow completely out of the shoe. I've been in keen deep snow and never had it get in. They're aren't complete water proof though, but they can hold their own in the wet. I can't wait to try them out in deep mud this spring, I can only image the traction.

Anywho, enough about the shoe, this is a photo blog! Right?!

So, I set this up exactly like yesterday, except that I used three lines this time. I taped on to the back of my closet to keep the shoe from flipping over and also to keep it steady. Worked pretty well until 5 seconds ago where it crashed to ground and scared me.

Gorilla tape and fishing line. All you need for awesome product shots.

ohh product shoot...I should do some of those in the field soon. Like outside in the mud...I like mud...this could be fun.

I digress..

Like I said I did this exactly like yesterday. Four shots, one to light the shoe (I cross lit this time, but with light painting of course), two with light trails, and one for the background. I shot at f13 ISO100. The exposure times were however long I thought I needed to get the shot. Between 5 and 13 seconds.

In Ps, I actually didn't do any masking. I did remove the fishing line from each frame, but I just stacked the layers and set the light trail ones to lighten. Worked perfect. I also re-colored the light trail ones to be orange instead of blue. I like orange better with this shoe.

I liked, there were 6 exposures. I had one more light trail one, and I had one to light the bottom of the shoe. The latter exposure I did do a little masking on, just to tone it down in places. I set it to lighten and it blended in perfect with the cross lit layer of the shoe.

After I had everything blended, I did a bit of dodging and burning, using a layer of 50% grey set to overlay to make it non-distructive editing, and then applied a high pass layer filter to a stamp visible layer set to overlay to further the hard light effect. Finally, I made another stamp visible layer and applied a lesser high pass filter to sharpen things a bit.

I didn't do anything in Lr.

Except export it.

Do you see the orange peel?

See you tomorrow!