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Anty-Human – 3 Days Left.

Trailer is now available. Click the ant to view it!

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Anty-Human – 4 Days Left.

Another shot revealed from the film – Trailer coming tomorrow!
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Here I used the Prinzflex 28mm F2.8. It’s one of my favourite lenses even though it has a very soft focus. While I can always fix the sharpness a little in post, there’s something this lens does that I can’t replicate in the edit. The focal plane of this lens is concave rather than being convex (parallel to the convexity of the glass). This means that while the subject in the middle of the frame is in focus (not entirely true in this shot), the edges of the frame will keep slightly more distant objects in focus while the background in the middle will be more out of focus.

You can somewhat see this effect in this shot. The bokeh in the middle of the frame is much wider than bokeh on the edges – note that the leaves in the centre are much closer than those on the edges too! I used this lens a lot in sequences containing ants, to give a wide angle picture of the scene but making it look “a little off” just like macro photography looks in comparison to e.g. landscapes.

This shot is from a sequence where ants have not been introduced yet. It’s a hint at the perspective of an ant – in actuality, the camera is in a bag that the actor is reaching into to take out some bread, but it should give a little clue to what’s coming.

Lightroom Experiments: Hit and Miss.

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Not quite as elaborate as the first image in the series but here I tried to create relatively believable gunshot flares.
The ricochet mark on the top left looks a little cartoony but I think that fits in quite well. A more subtle touch is the blood by the fallen soldier as well as reflections on the knee and helmet on the other.

Lightroom Expriments: Tunnel

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Before and after shot of what I’ve been working on recently. No actual Photoshop was used – just adjustment brush layers in LR. I tried to be thorough with reflections like the edges of the tunnel and elbows/knee of the soldier.

The “tunnel” is really the hollow part of the bottom of a wall-topper, where the cement binds. Said cement is the crumbled debris around the tunnel along with some “burning” moss.

300

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A week or so before this photo, I bought 300 dice. Consequently, I thought it would be an excellent investment to buy 300 toy soldiers. Yep, 300… Turns out I needed 4 (photo) but I have great plans for the rest! Speaking of plans, this post is a taster to what I’m going to be editing sometime next week. Yes, it involves tiny green guys but also something extra and something pretty awesome.

EDITED: I’m putting it off for now because I’ve had work photos to edit/send and a music video to shoot for a friend (poem). This future photo will unfortunately involve Photoshop at which I’m useless and the simplest things will take me hours to figure out.

Before I post the final outcome there will be some photos of random things from the same time period as well as a possible Macro Week #3 (found some interesting weeds in our “backgarden”). I thought I’d rather break the chronology a little but stick to posting daily.

Anyway, enjoy this little light-experiment. Typical student-life set up: Red tint is from flash behind a beer bottle and the “yellow” (originally light-blue is from a blue-ish bottle of cologne. Just the one off-camera flashgun used. Bottles were positioned to cover half of the flash on each side which gives the split in colours. Not sure what it looks like to you but the idea was that since the toy soldiers are all green, I’d separate them into different sides by giving them different colour casts – in other wards, revision rekindled my childhood love of toy war!!!

Dice City

wpid-wp-1402593968899.jpeg Probably the most expensive and time-consuming photo I’ve ever taken. 300 dice glued with pvc (temporary but strong enough to hold for a while) which took around 2 hours. Like I said in my “Negaticity” post, this is sort of a retake of that, on a slightly bigger budget. The “sky” is my duvet.

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Back to portraits: I guess this is a pretty cheap editing strategy but I like how high contrast, dark black and white portraits can change the mood of a photo. I played around with radial filters to make the faces evenly exposed and dark enough to make facial expressions ambiguous but bright enough to give a sense of the possible scene.