The Overdue Letter
The Overdue Letter
The Overdue Letter
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Nov, 2013Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken on an abandoned resort in Parañaque, Philippines. I love exploring decaying places so this was one of my go to places to shoot self portraits.Time
This is one of those "how will I get this kind of shot?" photos but you probably won't believe it but I took this photo on the afternoon around 4pm. While there was enough light to work with and less harsh light to deal with in post.Lighting
I wanted to get a night time feel to the photo with the candle lights but if I did it in actual lighting at night it would result in a very noisy and grainy photo. So what I did was instead took the photo at a time where the light would be flat with no direct light from the sunlight and just hiding on a shade also gave me a constant flat lighting that would be easier for me to work with in post production. The light on the candles are added later in post but the fire was there in the photo to begin with.Equipment
I only work with simple equipment and for this shot I had a Nikon D90 with a 50mm 1.8 on a tripod while I used a remote trigger for taking the self portrait.Inspiration
I was inspired by the feeling of longing/missing someone. And I wanted to make the photo sad and timeless so I used old items as props such as using just candles and the old letter/paper.Editing
Most of the image is definitely heavy in post-processing. I wanted to achieve the kind of image I imagined in my head for this so the colores had to be spot on. I expanded the frame to get a bigger image than I would have gotten from my crop sensor . The light and shadowing was also done in post, bright areas that were distracting was also removed highlights that should be where the candle light hits the subject was also painted in using curves and masking.In my camera bag
I have my Nikon D90 Camera and a 50mm, a tripod and remote.Feedback
This photo was one of my experimentation with post-processing. And given the limitaions I had with equipment I was still able to achieve what I wanted. My advice would probably be to plan everything accordingly and to know the basics with lighting and shadows as well as how it behaves. But if equipment isn't a problem for you then I advise to also play around and experiment, how about using flash to have a better lighting but instead use it in favor to blend the light with the candles than instead of having the flash with a different color that would look really artificial. But the possibilities are endless and you are your own limitations.
