Okay, I knew this whole stay-at-home-and-be-creative things was going to turn weird. I just didn’t think it would happen so quick. And once again, my wife was my inspiration. A couple of days ago Karen asked me to put a glass of water in the sink because she had accidentaly dropped a tissue in it. While walking to the kitchen I held it up to the light, and was mesmerized. She caught me turning it around and around in the sunlight, and gave me “the look.”
Fast forward to this afternoon. I took a large clear mixing bowl out into the studio, filled it with water, dropped in a tissue, blew some air bubbles into it, arranged my lights just so (including a small LED backlight), and started shooting. Here’s the basic setup.
I uploaded the RAW files into Camera Raw, did some basic processing, and then opened the best six or so frames in Photoshop. What happened next was about three hours of total, tunnel-visioned, bizarre, post-proccessing immersion. As I layered and blended things on top of each other, doged and burned, cloned, color graded, and warped, a strange, soggy-tissue world began to float on the screen in front of me. And little by little, one blend mode at a time, in three (or perhaps four) dimensions, there slowly stared outward at me, a fierce, other-worldly owl. Seriously, this is just tissues floating in a bowl… For a larger verion, go to Flickr.
Meta: Pentax K-3, 35mm 2.8 macro, somewhere around f/8, ISO 100, from 1/160th to about 1 second, about 6 base images, 50+ image and adjustment layers, two cups of coffee, no trips to the bathroom
