When your roommate comes home with a bunch of party poppers you get the urge to photograph the little explosions. For that purpose I bought a sound trigger from HiViz, but it doesn't work. Stupid internet piece of DIY junk. Anyway...
I stuck the Master Chief on the table using a little double sided tape. In front of him is a flash set to 1/32 power with a snoot made from the mostly green cover of a magazine to focus the light on him. Behind him is a red gelled flash set to 1/16. At these low powers the flash discharges very fast which is ideal for freezing the debris flying out of the poppers at high speed (this is how people do those amazing water drop shots).
Getting the lighting and colors right took some trial and error, as you can see from these shots:
You can see a beer can in a few of the shots, that should give you an idea of the Master Chief's size (he's about a foot tall), as well as some of the different flash positions I tried. Since my shutter speed was 1 second I toyed with using my computer monitor behind him with a bright purple tone on the screen, but at the last minute I decided it was a bad idea to fire these things directly at my laptop screen. Ultimately I went with the red flash directly behind him.
I used a remote to fire the camera with a 2 second delay. That gave me time to put my finger on the string to fire the popper. It took a whole lot of test shots before I was comfortable with the timing, which needed to be pretty much exactly when the flash was firing. I shot 3 out of 4 well enough to get some flying debris. After that I took Master Chief out of the frame and tossed some of the confetti randomly to use later.
Here are the shots that I took into Photoshop to create the final composite:
The confetti and debris were actually frozen so much that they didn't quite look right, so I added a little bit of radial blur to those layers to give them a sense of movement. Gave the Master Chief a tiny bit of motion blur as well.
Lastly I sent the composite image back into Lightroom where I gave it some color treatment and got rid of the edge of the table. Then back to Photoshop one last time to add the text and a border.
If I could do this over I'd have used a more reflective surface instead of a wooden coffee table. I think that would have made for a more full composition. But overall I'm really happy with how this turned out.
Thanks for looking, I'm happy to answer any questions about this shot or the techniques in general.
06-21-2009, 12:23 AM
Master Chief's Bad Day
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