Spot of Tea, If You Will

Probably one of the greatest things I have in my house right now is an electric tea kettle. I suppose an actual kettle would be just about as good...but I mean seriously, for the ease of use it's hard to beat. Just fill with water, press the switch and in about 2 minutes you have boiling water! The only down side is that you go through hot chocolate and tea really quickly...

Since it's been so cold out lately, and decided to honor the trusty kettle with a little portrait. Plus, I though it'd be pretty cool to have the steam coming out of it and everything... Next time I may try to do some light painting around it with a long exposure, I think that could be really cool actually. But you wouldn't get the same frozen steam effect, so I didn't try it tonight.

The big thing with this, and really any metal object, is dealing with the specular highlights. It's essentially a mirror, so any light source is reflected. I don't have a studio, only my room at home, so it was inevitable that there would be some funky stuff going on in the reflection.

Here's my set up...

There's one strobe behind the kettle to create a rim light and illuminate the steam coming out. Pretty simple. I believe this was at 1/64 power, so not very much. The other strobe was at about 1/8 power and pointed away from the kettle...and into the giant white sheet I had. I basically wrapper this around everything to create somewhat of a mini white studio.

Didn't reallllllly work...

But it helped. My first attempt were with just a umbrella, and you can plainly see it in the kettle. With the sheet up, you get a nice white reflection, and a reflection of me!

Yeah, I kept both reflections in the final composite. Hehe

I shot at f/8 and ISO100, mostly to get some good depth of field on the kettle.  The stutter speed is irrelevant for strobes, remember. I haven't been including it in a lot of post because of this.

I composited two images, one taken with the umbrella, and one taken with the sheet. I alined them in Ps, then used the lighten blending mode to blend them together. It worked really well, with minimal exposure change. After I'd composited, I did a stamp visible layer thing (just making a copy of everything and putting it into one layer) and then blurred that layer. I only applied this blur to the edges of the photo, and with a lighten blending mode. This created sort of a etherial glow going on.

Back in Lr, I upped the contrast on the steam a little bit, and on the handle. Just need them to pop a bit more.

See you tomorrow!