Breeze of Knowledge
Aug, 2013Views
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DigitalDawn
August 24, 2013
Very cool Aram I love the motion in this and the lighting very creative.
arambecker
August 24, 2013
Thanks :) I was quite busy last night with that discussion, but I still had that idea with a book, so I took the oldest book I could find, took it out into our nightly garden and tried around. I finally used my phone as a light source, holding it over the book and blew the pages. It took me a while and I hope none of the neighbors saw me lol
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arambecker
August 25, 2013
Thank you Blair! I'm like super creative the last two days, don't know why, but I'm doing somewhat unusual shots for me :)
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snowdon
June 12, 2015
Congratulations Aram on your Finalist Win in Ink and Paper contest ..great image
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Behind The Lens
Location
Well, that's kind of a long story as i took this photo throughout multiple locations. I startet in my room, went through the living room and kitchen and ended up in our garden, because I couldn't quit get the pitch black background. Back then I didn't own a light box so I used a chair on our table to get the night sky into the background. There might still be some remnants of my book shelf in the background as I blended two Images together to get the blur more or less even.Time
Because I needed the black background I had to take this photo at night, which probably annoyed our neighbors a bit... In addition to the light I had to shine through the neighborhood I produced a constant noise of the blowing pages and an occasional flash when I tried to get a few pages a little bit sharper. As I said, I started inside, so when I finally started to harass our neighborhood, it was long after midnight.Lighting
Yeah, that was the hardest part. As you can see, I tried to black out as much of the background as possible, hence I coulnd't shine too much light onto the chair the book was lying on. I ended up having two lights shining on the bottom of the balkony just over our garden plus my phone's torch and constantly forgot about my own shadow I often creaqted while moving in front of the lamps to blow the pages.Equipment
For this photo I used my Sony A57 and I believe my 18-55mm lens mounted on my tripod. I did try to use the flash to get some pages frozen in motion, but it didn't give me the results I wanted so I stuck to permanent lighting. For the lighting I used two lamps we had standing around in our living room and the torch of my phone which produced a clear contrast between the pages.Inspiration
During that time I was studying for my german exams and had a whole lot of books lying around on my table, most of them quite large, so I thought, why not capture that enormous amount of knowledge I had to jam into my head (was only about 10 pages, but still ;)). For the photo I took a book that was totally different from the ones I actually used then, but had the most intact cover. Because I had seen quite a lot of the photos lately where a round object creates the shadow of a heart between the pages, I decided to do something my own and came up with this idea. It took me a while to get the timig right and to blow the pages just right so they got evenly distributed over the frame.Editing
I had to do some basic post-processing as I shot the photos for this image in RAW format, and, originally not in black and white. So after I went through the around 60 photos I took and chose the best, I changed theem into black and white in Photoshop Lightroom. Then I started by basic editing routine and added a bit of contrast and clarity, lowered the shadows and pulled up the highlights a little bit. After I was happy with the result I passed all Images through Nik RAW Presharpener and Nik Define to lower the noise. In the end I imported two of these photos into potoshop and merged them to get the even blur effect.In my camera bag
That depends on the occasion, but I alwas at least take my camera with my 28-300mm lens whis is a great Allrounder for all types of photos. I usually also take all my other lenses (a 18-55mm, an old 10-24mm, a 55-200mm and a 100mm macro) with my which just fit in my bag. I also own a couple of neutral density filters, with some graduated ones, a UV-Filter for each lens and a polarisation filter for that perfectly blue sky or to limit water reflections. When I do nature shoots I usually wear the knee and elbow protectors for my inline skates, which work great if you lie down on stone or don't want to get dirty. In low-light conditions I also tyke my tripod and sometimes a bag I later fill with sand to limit movement during the photos. At home I now have a light tent with black and white backgrounds and two daylight lamps. With these I own two small and two large tripods for the lights, on which I can also mount a 4 in 1 reflector. If I feal really fancy I also use my self-made macro ring flash adaptor out of duck tape, paper and a toilet roll.Feedback
Experimentation and Patience! These have always been my leading motives when taking photos and I couldn't say which one is more important. of course planning is good, but it seldom works out just as expected when you do creative shoots. So when it doesn't work the first try, then start experimenting and try a second time, and a third time until you get just what you wanted (or something totally different, happens to me all the time). So don't give up, just keep trying and be creative, then you'll always get awesome (sometimes unexpected) results!
