There were some rods in for photography that would run in a corporate style advert for one of our retailer who has an in-house brand. It's a nice position to be in when you're asked to help out a key advertiser who's going places in what is currently a hard market to be in, recession and all that. Plus, it helps to remind people that I'm not just good for shooting outdoors!..
The ad team needed a single shot as the advert's main image and they'd already tried shooting against white but didn't like the result. So I suggested black background they went with it because it fitted with that slicker, corporate feel they wanted to get over in the advert.
So the shot started off with a bit of light painting using my trusty phone screen. exposure was 25sec at f/8. The length of the shutter speed allowed me to make sure I covered enough of the graphic, and the aperture made sure there was good sharpness. The client wanted it to run over a full DPS and it was decided that the whole graphic needed to be sharp, so shallow DoF was out of the question.
This was the best of three shots; the other two had patchy lighting (where I'd hovered with the phone for too long in one spot) and just didn't quite look right in terms of the way the light pool fell off. I outputted through Lightroom 3 into Photoshop to get it ready for the second layer, but not before cooling down the white balance so it would work well against the warmer light of the flash (original WB was 5500K, I changed it to 4400K).
So next was the shot using flash. I knew i needed a fairly strong highlight to left the top edge of the rod out from the black. Painting with the phone couldn't provide this because of the problems with a light source facing the lens (you get a ghosting of the screen moving) so i had to return to using flash. Of course, the beauty of merging shots is that as long as the camera stays put so the second image is identical in position, settings can change to allow flash on a much shorter exposure. I tried it on a long exposure, pressing the test fire button on my flash set to 1/64th power.
But it just didn't look right; it was hard to to move the flash along the blank without it being in shot and by doing it in bursts, I wasn't sure I'd nail a highlight that would authentic. In the end I settled for a flash out of shot set on a narrow beam, fired by a trigger with the camera on f/9 at half a second. The highlight isn't even because of light drop-off, but I don't mind that - it was easier to achieve it this way in one go. As you can see the highlight also catches some of the foam on the handle.
The merge was pretty simple; stack the layers in photoshop and just use a mask to 'uncover' the softer light pained shot. I did a fair bit of low opacity brushwork to avoid killing the highlight totally and finished off with a full selection (with a 150px feather) on the black areas before filling them with maximum black. This was to allow extension of the image using black to move it around the page so it could be shrunk.
The designer, Steve (a guy who's really getting into photography himself), was really happy with the result. I like it too, although I think there's so much more that can be done with mixing flash and painted light, and I think where highlights and rim lighting are concerned, it's the best way to attain a good result.
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