Nautilus Shell
Originally uploaded by doug_r

I may be getting into a bit of a rut here ... perhaps even an obsession. Black backgrounds, square crops, black and white / Platinum toned images of flowers, leaves and shells taken in natural light. Hmmmmmmm.....

At any rate, I'm really liking this image.

Shooting and processing details for the not so faint of heart:

The shell was positioned on a black background cloth; I thought I'd try black polar fleece, thinking the matte finish would swallow up the non-incident light. Turns out fleece, even though it looks black, has lots of tiny specular reflections from strong, even indirect light sources that wind up looking like dust spots. The shell was indirectly lit by sunlight filtered through some heavy blinds along the right side. There was also an opaque cloth blocking the sun as well, positioned at about the four o'clock position as well. This arrangement gives me a really soft light, that slides in a very liquid way over detailed textures especially when shot from directly above.

This image was shot with a Canon EF 90mm f2.8 Tilt Shift lens. The tilt axis lens of the lens was oriented at a 30 degree angle to the main camera axis so as to be roughtly perpendicular to the tiny ridges in the shell and roughly parallel with the broad surfaces of the shell. Focusing was on the same area.

Post processing more or less followed what is getting to be a common modification of my normal B/W workflow. After cropping the image, I used a threshold layer to establish the black and white pixels in the image and then used those to set the end points for a levels adjustment layer, followed by an application of a curves layer to bring up the shadows a bit. Next the image was converted to black and white using Nik Silver Efx - an amazing and flexible tool. I used AgEfx to under expose the image by about three-fourths of a stop and then to add the grain characteristics of Ilford Pan F plus 50 black and white film. Following this was a Selenium brown toning layer and a Platinum toning layer, both with fairly limited opacities. I didn't think this image needed any additional burning or dodging so a final pass of smart sharpening was done and then the entire thing was saved off to 72 dpi for web based display.

I'm still thrashing with the timing of sharpening in the workflow when using Silver Efx. Because you introduce grain with the film simulation, sharpening the image after that sharpens the grain as well as the image. As a result I'm thinking that sharpening (usually done last) should be done just prior to using the Silver Efx package - but I'm still experimenting on that issue.

I really like the way this image turned out. The Gaussian optic design of the 90mm TS lens is just blisteringly sharp on my 20D camera, so the very faint ridges on the shell are easily visible and filled with interesting micro textures. A fun shot and one of my best this month I think.

As always your comments are welcome.

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Originally uploaded by doug_r

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