Easter eggs: finding strange new worlds in an everyday object
Retro//Reflection - Issue #29
Once or twice per month I send out a letter with a handful of (my) photographs and share a bit of insight on the ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. As an enthusiastic photographer, anything goes.
Maybe you’ll learn something?
Or perhaps it will spark some inspiration?
I opened the fridge and looked straight at a tray of thirty colored eggs thinking “what are we gonna do with all these eggs?”1. Then I remembered I like to do these little photo projects that can be done from start to finish in a few hours. I’ve written about this before, I call them “fun little projects”. Have a look at issue #12 where I explain this process in a bit more detail:
So I took out the tray, got the camera2 on a tripod, positioned myself nearby a window for some natural light and immediately had issues with glare and reflections. Geez, these eggs are shiny! But main point of a fun little project is to not get carried away with complex setups and just roll with it.
Initially I positioned the camera right above an egg for a top down view and focused a bit on the patterns. But using a macro lens, depth of field is so narrow, the curvature of the egg meant that little was in focus (even when stopping down to f/16, but then the images became quite soft due to diffraction).
That got me thinking, maybe I can make it look like it’s some sort of weird planet - a strange new world photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope, perhaps? The shallow depth of field and the curvature really helps here. I used a piece of paper to block out part of the ‘planet’, to make it look like a partial eclipse.
I also tried going all the way to create blurry photos. Not quite like intentional camera movement, but the other way around. Shutter speeds were already quite long anyways (up to a second or two) so moving around the eggs in the frame made for some interesting ‘scenes’: I noticed an ocean and dessert dunes.
Finally I created some relatively ‘normal’ photos which could fit a food-photography category perhaps. We have these white fridge trays that can carry four eggs. I played around with different sets of eggs. In a top down view they also look a bit like a graphic for a marble game.
Editing (for those who are interested)
In editing I kept it simple as well: basic cropping, some (minor) exposure corrections and brushing out a few spots I didn’t like using the ‘healing’ function in Capture One. Here’s a before (left) / after (right) screenshot from the “blue planet” shot and from the photo near the top of this post:
A free giveaway
Maybe you’ve already read about it in a previous issue of Retroreflection, but sometimes I publish selected photos under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). If you want to know why I do this, please have a look at issue #15:
Anyway, I decided to publish the “blue planet” image with the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, so if you like you can grab it straight from my Ko-Fi page:
That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading until the end. Feel free to leave a short comment or message. Appreciate it!
Until next time, cheers,
Ronald
ronaldsmeets.info
ps: this article/letter/post is free, because I’m not doing this to make a profit. Also, I don’t like subscriptions at all. However, if you do want to show your support, a coffee always helps me writing and posting here ;-)
In case you are wondering: we bought them from the school parents' council to contribute for school trips (they use the money to rent busses for example).
Our trusty Canon 600D with an EF-S 60mm macro lens. So hardly the latest and greatest, but more than capable enough! :)
Wow, that’s so cool that you were able to create vastly different looking photos from the same subject
Great idea - I love those planet shots!