Last night at TCC (Toronto Camera Club) I got Best In Show in the pictorial competition for the “Altered Reality” category. I call my image “Washing The Stemware.”
It began as a photo I took a couple years ago of a window washer working on the building across from mine. I used a 70-200 mm lens with a 2x extension tube for an effective 400mm.
At the time, I didn’t have any use for the image, so, like most everything else I shoot, I let it simmer. Then, last month, as I was drinking a glass of wine and moaning about the growing stack of dirty dishes, I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be great if we could have tiny men to clean all the dishes for us! Cue the light bulb. I cleared off the table, arranged some lights, and created a background by draping a sheet of tin foil over an upended wooden box. I shot a wine glass against the tin foil background with my 100mm macro lens.
Finally, because it’s almost impossible to drape a sheet of tin foil over anything without producing crinkles, I shot the background alone and out-of-focus to blur away all the crinkles.
When I composited the images in Photoshop, I made a few touchups:
• flipped the blurred background upside down so that the hotspot would be immediately behind the glass
• gave the window washer a new foot which was missing in the original image
• darkened some of the window washer’s skin tones to make the lighting more consistent with the backlit glass
Now all I need is a small army of these guys and my dish-washing woes will be over.