Album 3
This is my third album in my collection for my capstone. This composite was the first time I had used light painting with photography in over a year. Something about hand drawn text really stood out to me, and it was a photography method I was eager to explore once again.
The Base Picture
I started out with a fairly simple yet beautiful picture of the cloudy sky as my base image. This was probably the easiest picture that I had to take for this album, as the cloud shape and design was already clean and had a lot of texture.
The Letters
Each letter was created using light painting, which is when you set your camera to an extremely slow shutter speed in order to catch every bit of light blur. The effect can be achieved with even a common household flashlight. For these particular shots I was in the entryway of my apartment at night with all of the lights off. I used a small button activated flashlight, and drew each letter reversed in the tagline I created, "The Future is Now". So for the letter "W" I set my camera on a 5 second timer along with a 15 second shutter speed. When the timer went off, I moved the flashlight as if I was writing on a dry erase board. Each letter was separately photographed, because instead of having the entire phrase grouped together, I wanted to have each image separate if I wanted to move the letters around. It was a tedious process, but it ultimately gave me more freedom in the end result.
Turning the Image Black and White
Although I really liked the imagery of the white clouds, the color of the light painting was a bright white, and looked much to similar to the clouds. To fix this I turned the image black and white in order to make the background colors much more muted looking in order to make the letters pop out.
Cropping around the letters
The letters were all white in color, but the area around them was entirely pitch black. To fix this I created layer masks for each letter, but also separated them into layer groups. I then painted on the layer masks around each individual letter in order to eliminate any sort of black edge showing up.
Adding the layer effect
I placed an overlay in order to get the black edges of the letters to blend in more with the black and white background. Having each letter separate from one another was nice, but it meant that I had to work in order to not have unnecessary amounts of black bleeding into the background image.
Finishing Touches
After finalizing what amount of darkness I wanted for the background, all that remained was fixing the letters in place. For the last final touch I added some text at the bottom which reads "Coming Soon...". It only occurred to me afterwards the irony of having the phrase "The Future is Now" while also stating that the album or supposed future is "Coming Soon".