Reflecting on the true colour of brass

  
I was contemplating what to enter in this week patch challenge, with the dual theme of Door/Door Knob and renewal, and I realised I had change the door knob on my studio to a lockable type. the contrast of the old worn paint and the bright shiny brass might make a nice simple story and photo. Metal surfaces, particularly when they are strongly reflective can be a challenge to get the right exposure so I had taken a bracketed set and kind of forgotten about it. I had used lightroom to expand the tone a little on the best exposure and shifted the clarity and vibrancy a little to the right but the brass was just a little to warm and the orange blown out. Other things took my attention and by the time I returned to decide whether to upload this, my photos had been auto-backed up and google+ had done its auto awesome thing again. I immediately spotted that the colours where truer (the door was open and the doorknob clearly in my view). So I immediately created a 16bit HDR image using picturenaut, and finished it in lightroom with much the same approach to the single image. The difference is a little astounding but I like it because to has treated the strong colours much more subtly and now looks exactly right in my view.

The Making of Patch Submission II

I took these photos back on the first of January principally as an illustration of New Year and Renewal, the first challenge for the Patch. Hopefully they tell the story of one of my new year resolutions, to clean up my studio. Then I re-read the challenges and realised it was more appropriate for the second week theme Resolution and Renewal. Sounds good, just wait, and in waiting I thought it would be good to create a montage/collage with a new page showing the messy floor being turned to reveal a clean floor. That was a good idea until +Laura Rivera  posted a very good new page turning on her diary for her first submission. Great photo nicely execution. Back to the drawing board for me! My next idea was just to have an overlapping collage. Looks ok but… the story seems back to front. So then I came up with the idea of printing out the photos, shredding them, collecting the pieces and reassembling a composite image. A bit more abstract this time Fair bit of work but I needed to convince myself this is a resolution I’m going to keep. Just in case your wondering yes I have cleaned up and things are “mostly” still tidy. If you want to see the final submission you’ll find it here.