Sometimes, you just have to go for the black shirt.
OK, so here’s the situation. My buddy Paul wanted me to do some pictures of his beautiful bride’s ring. We kept going back and forth about how we should best accomplish this, and all that kept coming out were picture ideas of her hand. Try as I will, I always think that the hand pictures of the ring always look as either:
A disembodied hand. Think Thing from the Adams Family
A Debeers commercial.
A really focused shot on the hand itself and not the ring
You can’t help it. Unless you are a hand model, and that is your thing, shooting your hand will just get you to incessantly look at all of the stuff going on in the hand. I thought that would take away from the beauty of the ring, and the moment.
I had them come to dinner, and asked them to bring 2 sets of flowers. After Dinner, I pulled out a Micro-Nikkor 70-180mm lens, some stands and poles, and fashioned the setup you see above. The flower is being held by a Reflector stand from Westcott. I used a Toothpick to remove enough petals from the rose to embed the ring in it and came up with this:
Because I knew that we would be so tight on the flower, I wanted to get a background that wouldnt distract. Black background. I ran to the closet and got one of my black Tshirts. Voila. No distraction. A little bit of post processing in Photoshop (Nik Sharpener) and we were good to go.
You dont state how you lit it. Was it flash with softbox or the available room light on a long exposure. Im thinking long exposure with available light, easier to see/control any “bling” on the ring.
Great image. And I love when I can take something laying around and use it in a cool way for photography. Makes me feel even more creative. 🙂
Very creative. I don’t see any lights. How did you light it?
Nice creative set up using whats available to make a shot work!
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Just a note to let you know how much I enjoyed the Nik Webinar this morning. One question though, is Lightroom necessary to use the Nik HDR Pro software? Looking forward to the next season of D-Town also.
Hey Charlie: No! That’s the cool part, – HDR Efex Pro can work as a standalone! – RC
[…] for a picture that was in part inspired by an image taken by RC Concepcion (to see the image, click here) that I felt like she would […]