Da Budda

Every year, there's the county fair. (duh) A long time ago, maybe 9 years (?), I bought this cheap little Budda carving necklace. I think it's really cool, and tonight I rediscovered it. I thought it might make a cool picture somehow. 

A lot of nights have started like that, just finding something cool and then building a picture around it.  It took me about an hour before I came up with a good (debatable) idea. I would do a shutter drag picture of the necklace in my hand. The blur from the shutter in combo with some freezing action of a strobe might turn out really cool. So I played around with hard and soft light to see which I liked more, and eventually decided on soft.

I set the shutter to .4s, the aperture to f9, and ISO100. The strobe was in a softbox at 1/128th power, but it was very close to my hand so I needed to really stop down or it was way to bright. 

After that, I pretty much just played around until I got something I liked. I had the 50mm with a +4 macro filter on so that I could focus closer.

For editing, I raised the whites a lot to get some contrast in there, then bumped the clarity and sat a bit to make more of a pop. If you every have to choose between having dark darks and white whites, I'd go with white whites. At least that's the common trend in contemporary photography it seems. Anyway, to finish up, I added a strong vignette.

See you tomorrow!