Brain Maggots

Groundskeeper Willie

2015-07-03T05:10:00.000+08:00

The Pilot

2014-05-17T10:59:00.000+08:00

Danica Joy Bance

2013-05-21T04:26:00.000+08:00

Danica is turning 18 and I was asked to shoot her pre-debut photos. She's a very bubbly lady and is very easy to talk to. She also plays the piano, violin, guitar and loves K-Pop, J-Pop, anime and everything Asian. Very lucky parents to have such a talented daughter.

Ryan

2013-01-30T04:59:00.000+08:00

Here's my good friend Ryan. He was hanging out in my place and I decided to do a quick portrait session. It took us less than 5 minutes to shoot and I'm quite happy with the result. It actually took me longer to charge my batteries than to do the whole shoot.

Happy 2013!

2013-01-21T14:36:00.004+08:00

I know I haven't posted anything for 2012. Yep... not even a single word. I guess it's a good thing... it means that I've been very busy to be able to take care of my blog.

Anyway, I had my first shoot for this year with a new kit (finally!!!) and I'm happy with the way things turned out. The 85 was tack sharp and the focus was really spot on. Made the boo-boo of setting the RAW file to only 4mp instead of 18mp *ack* but then again, who would've noticed on Facebook, right?

2012's been really good to me and I'm hoping that 2013 would be better. Not sure when I'd be able to post again -- and I'm really hoping that I can, let's all have a great year ahead of us. Cheers! :)

PS. I'm not done with my 30 day food challenge and I'm hoping to get them done and I will.

Day 18 - Kisses

2011-07-31T14:54:00.002+08:00

Day 17 - Curly Tops

2011-07-30T02:03:00.001+08:00

Day 16 - Kit Kat

2011-07-28T04:01:00.001+08:00

Day 15 - Coffee beans

2011-07-27T01:21:00.000+08:00

Day 14 - Hello Panda

2011-07-26T03:11:00.002+08:00

Day 13 - Skittles

2011-07-25T06:14:00.000+08:00

Day 12 - Kiamoy

2011-07-23T10:30:00.002+08:00

Day 11 - Smint

2011-07-22T22:39:00.002+08:00

Day 10 - Mini Chips Ahoy

2011-07-21T23:26:00.002+08:00

Day 9 - Nerds

2011-07-20T23:01:00.002+08:00

Day 8 - Mini Oreo

2011-07-19T22:20:00.000+08:00

Day 7 - Maltesers

2011-07-18T22:34:00.002+08:00

Day 6 - Halls

2011-07-17T23:03:00.000+08:00

Day 5 - Mentos Rainbow

2011-07-16T16:26:00.002+08:00

Day 4 - Polo

2011-07-16T00:42:00.001+08:00

Day 3 - Marshmallows

2011-07-14T23:54:00.001+08:00

Day 2 - m & m's

2011-07-14T01:29:00.001+08:00

Day 1 - Tic Tac

2011-07-13T01:03:00.000+08:00

30 Day Challenge

2011-07-13T00:56:00.000+08:00

My last entry was October 2010. So yeah, it's been a while since I last blogged and I'm feeling like I'm stuck on a rut. A few days ago, a friend shared a TED Talks motivational video to me and it gave me an idea. So I'm gonna give it a try and see if I can come up with an interesting body of work.

The first concept I'm thinking of is a 30 day macro challenge. The mechanics would be very simple -- absolutely no post-processing. No cropping, no sharpening, not even renaming of the file. Just like the good old days of yore. So good luck to me and the next 30 days. :)

Making the leaf

2010-10-29T17:34:00.000+08:00

This is something that I entered in a photo contest. Sadly, it didn't win but I'm still proud of it. Anyway, here's a walk-through of how I did the shot after the jump.

First, the set up.

Setting up the lights:

When shooting translucent material, I find that it always worked best when they are back-lit so I placed the leaf on top of a softbox that's facing the ceiling.

The LED light that you see on the photo above does not affect the overall exposure of the photo as I was using a fast shutter speed and a fairly high aperture and my ISO was at 100 so I need not worry about it affecting my photo. The LED was used to help me focus because I was using a 50mm lens with a single ring from an extension tube so my auto-focus is practically useless.

Getting some depth:

The first time I tried shooting the leaf, I laid it flat on the softbox which resulted in an image that showed the texture of the material of the softbox. My solution was to get a couple of toothpicks and glue them to a small piece of paper and laid it on top of the softbox which gave me enough distance to blur out the background.

Exposure:

Everything here was done manually and I can no longer recall the aperture or the flash power that I was using but I believe that the final shot that I chose was around -1 or so.

Post-processing

Black and white conversion

The first step was to add an Invert adjustment layer to make the white canvas black.

I then added a Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

I then ticked the Monochrome checkbox at the bottom-left corner of the box then added a lot of blue to make the dark gray area completely black and added a little bit of red to bring out some of the texture.

That's about all the adjustments that I did.

Sharpening

To sharpen the image, I selected the background layer and made a duplicate. I then selected Filter > Other > High Pass...

This isn't the exact value but this is around that neighborhood. The main thing that I focused on here was to sharpen the edges of the leaf.

I then changed the blending mode of the layer to Overlay and adjusted the opacity a bit.

The entire post-processing only took a few minutes since I have already visualized the end result even before I started shooting. I've realized that it's always a good idea to know what you want to achieve before you shoot.