And On The 7th Day I Created The Universe!
Earbud photo taken with Canon 5DA few months ago I was laying in the bath reading a magazine (as one does), the title of which escapes me, when I noticed a photograph of an iPod with the "earbuds" lying on top. It suddenly struck me how much an earbud resembles the USS Enterprise...
This kind of quirkiness is right up my street and I immediately decided I would photograph an earbud and put it in a space setting. As I mentioned, that was a number of months ago and although doing other things in the meantime, the idea has stayed with me. The main reason for not doing it earlier was a need to create a suitable space backdrop - as I don't have access to the Hubble Space Telescope!! Whereas, taking a photograph of an earbud is not all that challenging.
In the end it proved to be the case that creating a realistic star field with all the trimmings is not all that trivial. Although not counting, I would estimate that it took about 5-6 hours Photoshop work to complete the space scene shown above. Another slight issue was that I decided that I wanted it BIG. I knew I could take a large image of the earbud - and I wanted to be able to print it up to about one meter square - only at that size can you see the detail in the background. This meant working with a canvas size of 10,000x10,000 pixels. Needless to say on occasion this reduced my PC to a crawl. As this was my first attempt at a deep space location, I scanned the Net for various real images from space, and duplicated what I saw in Photoshop. I also ended up scanning a leaf to create a texture brush for the main planet. It is strangely pleasing to create whole galaxies, in a megalomaniac kind of way!
Then came the easy part, photographing the earbud (kindly donated by my girlfriend). The only tricky part there was keeping sweat away from the camera and subject as it was a baking hot day (around 40°C) and the air conditioning could not be used as it blew the hanging earbud all over the place. It was also the first time I have shot tethered with the 5D - which turned out to be a godsend, not having to hunch over the camera I could hold the reflectors in place and trigger the shutter at the same time - note the lighting, adjust without having to move.
Some more Net crawling in the land of Star Trek (it seems the internet was created for Trekkies) to check out how their engines "work", and some time re-creating in Photoshop. Actually that was harder than expected, due to the fact that the cable had to be cloned out (I doubt my cutting the cable would have met with enthusiasm), and the inner engine bay created. It can't really be noticed here, but when printed the inside of the engine bay can clearly be seen, so something had to be done. Making that more complicated was the fact that when I created it there was no light coming from the engine, so I had to make it just dark enough to have detail that would then be brightened when the engine flame was added. That done it was time to add the actual flame - in true Star Trek blue.
Then it was just a case of font matching and adding the text - and to try to see if a motion blur worked. Still not sure about that, but decided to leave it in.
The things I do!
In the end it proved to be the case that creating a realistic star field with all the trimmings is not all that trivial. Although not counting, I would estimate that it took about 5-6 hours Photoshop work to complete the space scene shown above. Another slight issue was that I decided that I wanted it BIG. I knew I could take a large image of the earbud - and I wanted to be able to print it up to about one meter square - only at that size can you see the detail in the background. This meant working with a canvas size of 10,000x10,000 pixels. Needless to say on occasion this reduced my PC to a crawl. As this was my first attempt at a deep space location, I scanned the Net for various real images from space, and duplicated what I saw in Photoshop. I also ended up scanning a leaf to create a texture brush for the main planet. It is strangely pleasing to create whole galaxies, in a megalomaniac kind of way!
Then came the easy part, photographing the earbud (kindly donated by my girlfriend). The only tricky part there was keeping sweat away from the camera and subject as it was a baking hot day (around 40°C) and the air conditioning could not be used as it blew the hanging earbud all over the place. It was also the first time I have shot tethered with the 5D - which turned out to be a godsend, not having to hunch over the camera I could hold the reflectors in place and trigger the shutter at the same time - note the lighting, adjust without having to move.
Some more Net crawling in the land of Star Trek (it seems the internet was created for Trekkies) to check out how their engines "work", and some time re-creating in Photoshop. Actually that was harder than expected, due to the fact that the cable had to be cloned out (I doubt my cutting the cable would have met with enthusiasm), and the inner engine bay created. It can't really be noticed here, but when printed the inside of the engine bay can clearly be seen, so something had to be done. Making that more complicated was the fact that when I created it there was no light coming from the engine, so I had to make it just dark enough to have detail that would then be brightened when the engine flame was added. That done it was time to add the actual flame - in true Star Trek blue.
Then it was just a case of font matching and adding the text - and to try to see if a motion blur worked. Still not sure about that, but decided to leave it in.
The things I do!
posted by NIMBY at Tuesday, June 13, 2006
2 Comments:
The reality is that I don't have anything better to do - in fact I can't think of anything which would be better to do, creating rubbish like this just about tops my list of things to do these days!
Saving babies does not appear on my list at all - if anything there are too many already.
But, the cold beer sounds good. That is definitely on my list, nestling in #2 position.
If I sent it to Apple they would probably just sue me for copyright infringement. Ah the life of a bum eh?
Enough of the baby talk! You are scaring me.
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