“ Relax ” Well this turned out to be one of those weeks where I have tried something completely new to me, I made a star shape out of an old business card and the lights were from an ornamental tree. I tried a few things as the main subject, but then spotted this Relax sign and thought I could probably do something a bit creative with this that would fit the bokeh background. lighting was quite tricky as I didn't want to light anything beyond the bokeh lights and also having a lot of the lens covered made it tricky to get enough exposure on the subject. I ended up using a torch to light the sign, and with some playing around, eventually got the exposure about right. I edited the image in Lightroom first, then photoshop to remove the stand the wooden puppet stands on.
“ swinging light ” I decided to make the image only the flashlight for this weeks challenge, this is a very simple, yet striking effect. The image was created by pinning a tiny torch to the ceiling on a bit of cotton and mounting my camera underneath. I set the shutter to bulb, and with a remote shutter started the capture after swinging the light. 68 seconds later, this was the result. I edited the image in Lightroom where I created a radial filter and changed the tone in the centre, then duplicated it and inverted it to change the tone outside the filter.
“ All in the light ” I struggled a little to come up with an idea again this week, so decided to go for the extra credit and do a self portrait. I started by trying different coloured clothes and backgrounds, but none were too impressive, so I decided to try a different idea, using coloured gels to create the complementary colours. I took quite a few different images, but eventually ran out of time, so had to make my choice. I quite liked the tones in this particular portrait, and although not perfect, I am happy with the result anyway.
