Monday 3 December 2012

Christmas lights

My friend , lighting designer Renato De Toffol was awarded the contract to design and set up the Christmas lights for the city of Olten near where I live.

The lights are beautifully designed and consist of "curtains" of fairy lights and large translucent balls which project stars onto nearby surfaces.

It was bitterly cold when I was photographing the lights and once or twice my 5D MkII wouldn't respond. This was solved by removing the battery from the camera and keeping it in my jacket for a while to warm up.

My son Thomas accompanied me and I learnt that he has a great eye for potential pictures. He would go off and scout a new location while I photographed the current one.



This is a photo that Thomas took of me standing on a dumpster after he suggested that the image would be better if I had a higher viewpoint.





This is the image that resulted. he was right  :)

Overnight after shooting the images it snowed quite heavily and I thought that it would be a good idea to retake some of the better viewpoints with snow in them.

Unfortunately most of the snow had gone and some of it had turned to slush by the time darkness came, so I was only able to retake a few images using the wet streets for reflections.

One of my favourite images from the night is of a water fountain. I decided to play around with it in photoshop. I took two images with all the same settings. One image was sharp and the other deliberately out of focus.


  
Both images 2.5 sec @ f11

In Photoshop, I overlaid the blurred image on top of the sharp one. Then I used the standard ersaer tool to "wipe away" the unsharpness on the figure of the lady. I quite like the effect.

The result 

You can see a few more from this shoot over on Renato's website here.

What do you think?

As ever. Thanks for reading and please leave a comment.



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