Pregled posta

Marketing

I’m a big fan of making life easy, so several shortcuts went into making this image. The bottle was shot without any labels, with a medium softbox behind, and a large octobox in front (camera left). A large white reflector was placed image right, and as close in as I could get without blocking the shot. The background is pure Photoshop, and the bottle was placed on a pedestal stand barely larger than the bottle, so I could get the lighting very close to better cover the 'family of angles'.

The labels were removed with the aid of a wheat bag, but a hot-water-bottle would do just as well. Leave it on the label for at least minute before pealing them off, and have a sheet of A4 (10 x 8) ready to paste them onto. I used the smooth back edge of a craft knife to flatten out a few creases. The labels were then scanned.

I took shots of the bottle with the labels on, and use these as a guide to Free transform the shape of the scanned labels after compositing them onto the bare bottle. There is very little curve at the top of the label because that edge is near the lens axis so appears flat. A curves layer was linked to the label layer to darken it, and a soft brush used to mask it out in line with the lighter strips . This gave the labels depth and made them look real.

The bottle was selected with the Pen tool, and copied to a new layer. I used the clipping path to stroke with a soft dark brush to slightly darken the edges, but did this on a new layer so I could mask in only the bits I wanted. I had some CAs which I fixed with a Hue/saturation layer by desaturating the reds, and reducing tonal value to match. The mask was inverted and painted in where needed.

I could not be arsed to go back in the studio to shoot the glass this evening, so found it with Google. (I’ll do it properly tomorrow) The etched motif was done by making a luminosity mask from the scanned label; filling the selection with white; adding some noise and blur, and finally using layer styles to produce the emboss. This was composited onto the glass with Free transform to follow its shape.

The glass already had the reflection, so I faked the bottle by selecting the bottom inch, and copying to a new layer. This was flipped vertically, and forced to the shape of the bottle with free transform using warp. The tiny shadow was made by Ctrl clicking the bottle layer to load the selection, and filling a new layer with black. This was blurred, and moved into position, and finally cleaned up with a layer mask.

Altogether about two hours work including both studio and Photoshop, and I can swap out the labels in the layer stack to quickly produce all the whites with no more studio time.

My friend, Steve, and I spent the summer re-opening a trail to the Burro Mile which has been unused for decades now. In late June or early July I was working my way nearly three miles up the trail when I came to a marshy area.

Not wanting to take the trail across a swamp I headed up stream from the marsh hoping to find its source. I did find it.

About 30 yards up, the marshy area apexed at a muddy spring dripping water out of the rocks as it trickled down and spread out across the hillside. I cleaned out the brush and gravel and found the water essentially was coming out of just a small area of pebbles.

The next week I took a 3 foot pvc pipe which I had pointed at one end and had drilled holes in and worked it into the wet gravel and pepples until only an inch or so of the pipe remained sticking out. Within 10-15 minutes the water was running cool and clear. Now the spring is where I refill my water bottles. I always pause here to rest and drink this excellent spring water.

The area around the spring is a maple grove crisscrossed with deer trails. The maples grow leaning over to the side as though they are bent under the weight of the snow which falls deep in this canyon 6-7 months out of the year.

Beyond the maples and down towards the stream bed cottonwoods, willows, birch and finally spruce, douglas fir and pinyon pine grow in abundance along the north face of the canyon.

After walking this trail dozens of times during the summer the image has been seared into my mind and I finally spent a few weeks putting my pen to my memory. I spent about 30 hours on it.

It's like a dream. No?