Peter Figen
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
|
jpatrickdowns wrote:
Gorgeous industrial photo closeup! Superbly lit, imo, to give dimension and highlight all the details (did you have to retouch much dust?). The diagonal composition is really strong too. 👉 The company should buy this photo from you. Well done. Tell us more about the lens if you don't mind ... 35mm (24x36) lens, I assume, or medium format? Adapted to the GFX100II (a camera I covet), I assume. Cheers.
Thank you for your compliments. Most of the information you're wanting is already listed above. This was shot with a Fuji GFX100 II at ISO 80 - 102mp on a 33mmx44mm sensor - with a Contax 645 120mm f/4 Macro adapted to the camera with a Fringer adapter. There were 172 separate focus slices put together using Helicon Focus focus stacking software. Since it's often difficult to pre-visualize the exact composition when doing large focus stacking projects, I didn't get this one right until the third try, which took a couple of days and then about a week in post painstakingly fixing all the crap that you'd never ever see with your bare eyes, retouching out dirt and voids in the paint and drawing many many Paths in Photoshop to use as the basis for selections most often to add or control tonal separation where two or more planes met, in order to enhance the sense of dimensionality and depth.
As far as selling it to the company is concerned, most companies have little interest in images like these as their products only need a simple illustrative product shot on a website or Amazon or McMaster-Carr to sell these types of industrial tools and would never ever pay what it's worth to use this type of image. The place where this type of image makes the most sense is for a trade show booth printed ten to twenty feet wide. They'd have to pony up about twenty grand to make worth my while, and that just won't happen in this marketing climate so I'm more than content to do these to amuse myself and push the envelope out even a little bit if possible.
For an image like this, I would have chosen between either the Contax macro lens I did use or to use the Rodenstock Digaron 105mm f/5.6 APO Macro FLOAT lens (about $6500 at B&H) that I have attached to a Novoflex focusing bellows. Either one would have worked equally well but the Contax is less of a handful and the floating element system is automatic as you focus whereas the Rodenstock's floating element has to be manually set for the specific reproduction ratio you're shooting at. The Rodenstock and the Contax are pretty much hand in hand until you need to either go less than about 1:5 where the Contax pulls ahead or closer than 1:1 where the Rodie is optimized up to 3:1 or three times life sized. So, lots to consider when choosing what to shoot with.
|
