I’ve been playing around with the Pep Ventosa technique today. One of the benefits of doing the 365 project (photo a day) is it forces you to find new camera techniques to do to keep things interesting. I’ve seen this technique quite regularly for the past few years, but never settled down to have a go.
So I popped out to the garden in search of something to photograph that Debbie wouldn’t mind me digging up. We have a scattering of these Grape hyacinths all around the garden…so I thought I was on safe ground bringing some of these in. They actually smell quite nice so Debbie was quite happy that I had brought them in 🙂
I set up next to my office window having first cleared out about 5 camera bodies and half a dozen lenses! I used a reflector to bounce some light back into the rear of the vase (which is one of Debbies favourites and I was warned that any damage would be dealt with severely). I then took 13 shots as I rotated the vase around. I took all these shots into lightroom and blended them all together with the Multiply blend method, lightened it with a levels layer and then added a texture (a photo of our kitchen floor) over the top – painting it out of the vase and flowers area.
I quite like the result and it was relatively easy to do. It does make for rather a large file – I didn’t merge the layers (which would obviously solve the large file problem) and it came out at an impressive 2.52gb. It’s no wonder I have 4 external drives to hold all my photography files!