Wait...another??

Tonights photo looks only familiar...it's nearly the same as another photo I did not too long ago. For some reason, I've been acquiring old Canon film cameras. The last photo was a Canon XT-1 or something like that, I don't remember. It used light painting to illuminate the camera in a variety of ways, then composited it all together later.

Today, I found an old Canon TX. Don't know anything about it, but it has a sticky mirror, so I assume that's why it was thrown out. It has no lens, it's just the body, but I thought that might be interesting for a picture! Especially with light painting from the back of the camera to hit the mirror!

First things first, I had to set up the background. Step 1: Aquire black cloth. Step 2: Tape to wall.

Next, set camera. The way I'm light painting doesn't take too long, 5 seconds is usually the shutter I use. f/8 gave me fairly good depth of field, while still being bright enough for my iPhone's LED to light with.

I wanted to highlight the mirror so I focused on that. Normally, I could focus on the logo, and I do with it was more in focus, but the mirror is more important.

There are 6 lighting painting layers in the final composite. Four of them are just me lighting the camera from different angles. First, I'll did a top down. Then, I did a one where I got more of the front lit. Next, I had one from the bottom. Finally, I did one where I made a bunch of light trails behind the camera, and back lit everything.

For the last two layers, I lit the inside of the camera from the front, and by way of the view finder in the back. With the front light layer, I only used the part of it that lit the interior of the camera. Since the interior is recessed into the body, I had to light pretty intensely on the rest of the camera, resulting in over exposure. I didn't want the rest of the body that bright, so I made a layer mask to get rid of it.

To capture the inside light by way of the view finder, I just put the LED right up the view finder. Pretty simple, but with cool results! Light travels both ways in a camera.

The more I look at the picture, so more I wish I had a tilt shift lens to adjust my plane of focus. That way, the whole camera would be crisp. Darn, maybe the future.

I sort of all ready described how I edited. In Ps, I set all the layers to lighten, which makes only the brightest areas of all the layers be shown in the final composite. In other words, if there are three layers of 155, 187, and 230 brightnesses, only the 230 layer will be shown in that spot. This makes awesome results when compositing light trails and such.

For layers that I didn't want to keep the whole part of, I just used layer masks to select the parts I wanted. Simple.

Nothing in Lr, this is pretty much out of the camera! More or less...

See you tomorrow!