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Rainbow Cutlery

What you see is what the camera saw.

 

Playing with an idea I saw in Amateur Photographer Sept 2009. Since posting this I found the actual prize-winning shot here on Flickr, that appeared in the magazine, which was taken by David Meredith - unfortunately since I originally wrote this David Meredith has stopped being a member of Flickr, so I have had to remove the link to his prize-winning photo. David won the 'Bold Colour' round of the 'Amateur Photographer of the Year 2009' (APOY09) for his shot, which is way better than my poor attempt to duplicate it above.

 

Congratulations to David for his excellent shot and winning this round of the competition.

 

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UPDATE: Since posting this shot, one of my good Flickr friends, Greg50 (who has a wonderful photostream - worth visiting ...), has posted his own variation. You can find it here - 2 forks. He has used 2 forks and as a result introduced a very pleasing symmetry into the shot. Don't you just LOVE Flickr!?

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The shot has coloured pencils, a spoon and fork. The colours you can see in the spoon and fork are reflections of the coloured pencils. There has been no additional processing or manipulation.

 

Experimented for 2 weeks with the setup, and took hundreds of shots before finally getting this one. Natural light long-exposure.

 

25 seconds, f25, +2EV, ISO 100, 180 mm, manual focus, an old tripod and remote shutter release. Shot raw and converted using Sony Image Data Converter SR Ver 3, and increased the saturation and contrast .

 

Other info: Had to buy a new fork and spoon because ours had minor scratches and were not shiny or reflective enough for the shot above. Also bought 2 sets of coloured pencils to get more than one each of the primary colours. Background: black t-shirt. Foreground: black folded card (there were actually many more pencils lined up than show in the shot, as you can see in the reflections, but the foreground card covered many of them up to give a cleaner overall image). Another card was fixed to the camera to shade the foreground black card, so that it had the same depth as the t-shirt, but provided a crisper dividing line than material would have done.

 

Interested to find that yesterday's shot - a one-off on automatic settings, received well over twice the favourites and proportionately more comments/views than this shot. And yet this shot must have taken hundreds of times longer and far more effort and experimentation to get right! Must be a message there somewhere, but not sure what it is .... Perhaps the shot is too radically different from the norm for most people's tastes. Thanks for all the positive comments, though - every one is very much appreciated!

 

-Added to the Cream of the Crop pool as my personal favorite, because of the length of time it took to get the shot right!

 

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Uploaded on October 10, 2009
Taken on October 8, 2009