my Split Second

On special request, I’m doing a blog on the making of the image “Refractions are“.

Envisioning

Again, the idea was to capture reflections of light. In this case it started while cleaning up some kids toys laying on the floor. It was early in the morning and the sun was shining brightly through the windows from a low position.

I noticed a purple/orange reflection in an abstract pattern on the door when I held one toy in the sunlight. My immediate thought was: “That’s my picture of the day!”

Shooting

So I got my camera out, put the toy in the bright sunlight, near the door, cursed because a cloud passed by, waited, cleaned up a little more until the raincloud had passed, and returned to my camera when the sun was shining brighter than before.

Here’s a sketch of the “lighting scheme”:

And here are two shot of my very elaborate setup:

Post processing

The images turned out to be duller than expected, so I started my favorite image editor, and removed some spots on the door, changed the curves, brightness and contrast to give the image some more punch.

That was still not abstract enough . So I duplicated the layer, chose the Other>Minimal filter and merged it with a 50% layer transparency.

Results

This finally resulted in the image below: