"Light" 07/02/11
I was looking around for something to contrast with heavy and found a small chicken feather amongst my eggs. I tried photographing this with a macro lens against a high key white background but I found it difficult to get the background colour correct and a consistent colour and contrast on the feather. I needed to rethink this one.
"Light" 08/07/11
A colleague gave me some bigger and better feathers from an old duster. They photographed OK against the white background, this time using my zoom lens but I needed the background out of focus so I could give the impression they were floating, I then hit on the idea of suspending them from nylon threads in front of the backdrop. I could only attach the thread through the shaft of the feather at one end so I decided to photograph three individual feathers, rotate them and make a compound image in Photoshop. The high key lighting effectively burnt out the nylon thread and I put together an image from these three:
This was my first attempt but I had to keep the separate images apart so the borders didn't overlap and obscure each other. The resulting image looked a bit static and staged.
I went back to Photoshop, did some reading and learned how to make the white background of each image transparent by setting the layer to Multiply. I then re-set the positions of the feathers to introduce an overlap and give the image a base and appear to be floating gently downwards.
The lighting for this set was identical to the previous "Sour" series. Camera settings 1/125s, f22, 135mm
As a contrast to the mass of a tank, I think this works well, not only by the contrast in the structure of the two objects (nature vs. heavy engineering) but in the location, i.e. a muddy common and a pristine set. I have photographed a man made object in natural surroundings and a natural object in artificial surroundings.
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