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“Stress: The confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it.”
- Unknown
I admit it: I sort of love that.
And on that note, here's hoping you have a great, stress-free (and nonviolent!) weekend.
Song: Respect by Aretha Franklin
Image: Little jade Buddha Marcus bought for me in China. Photographed with Nikon D300, 50mm manual lens.
Sat, November 21, 2009
Reader Comments (7)
Love this shot!
Brilliant definition of the word :)
Love the definition of stress!
he-he
Love this quote! When stressed, I have been known to use a more, um... colourful word than jerk. Just saying.
And beautiful image - I know the Gadling site is geared to photography, but maybe sometime you could talk about how you achieve that selective lighting with black all around and behind the item you are highlighting in your photo? I'd love to experiment with that - you do such a fine job of it.
(I love NaBloPoMo for all the Chookooloonks we are getting - what a wonderful gift for November - thank you!)
Jet --
Okay, this is going to get a bit technical, so apologies...
Oftentimes, the effect you're talking about I use processing (Photoshop) to make it happen, but in this case, I didn't. This shot was actually taken fully manually. I placed the Buddha on my dark wood kitchen table. There's a window close by to my left, which provided most of the light (there's also a window to my right, but it's much farther away). I have the ISO set to 200 (to make sure that the final image isn't grainy -- I wanted to reduce grain because I didn't want to take away from the details of the tiny Buddha), and a wide open aperture (f1.4) so I could get a shallow depth of field. I set the shutter speed to 1/200 of a second, which was fast enough to pick up the light on the Buddha, but too fast to grab the light going on behind it, which is what why it looks darker in the back.
Then I clicked.
In Photoshop, I bumped up the contrast a bit, but that's pretty much it.
Hope this helps -- thanks for your question and sweet comment!
K.
Me, too. Love this definition. And...I am all for non-violence. Thanks, too, for the info about how you took the shot. Very helpful.