You aren't signed in     Sign In    Help

Binoculars portrait (dscn4659_mod_vign_sm)

Here's the IR remote control!
Do you think I should shave? ;-)
Binoculars portrait (dscn4659_mod_vign_sm) by gerlos.
Self portrait with big binoculars (15x70).
È importante saper guardare lontano. View On Black

Some people asked me how i did this shot... Ok, I'll tell you!

It was twilight and there was a really soft and cool light outside... I put on a red t-shirt (yes, it was red...) and I've put my camera on a tripod, at she same height of my eyes, ten or twelve meters away. I zoomed, so I fill up the scene and flatten perspective, and played with esposition time and aperture until I was happy with them (I wanted a slight overexposed photo).
To take these shots I looked at the camera wth binoculars (I couldn't see anything, since it was too close to focus through binoculars!) and used a IR remote control to shot, you almost can see it on my right hand.

After that, I fired up digiKam and threw away a lot of shots, keeping only three or four of them, with the right exposition and composition and with interesting reflections on the lenses.

Next, I opened the most promising image in digiKam editor and cleaned up it using greycstoration to remove noise and unwanted details and cropped it.
Using curves tool I applyed a sigmoid to set black and white point and to increase constrast and saturation (the magic is here!).

I love vignetted images, dark and saturated colors on the borders, so I opened with Gimp the edited image, duplicated the backuground layer, selected using a lot of father and cut away the central part of the image, changed layer mode to "multiply", and duplicated this layer 3 times.
To add more vignette, I creaded a new, white layer on top, changed its mode to multiply (this way you can see the layers under it), and did a rectangular selection, smoothed and fethered it a lot, inverted and filled of black.

That's all! Hope you like the result!
Let me know if you have any suggestion or if you made similar images! 
This photo has notes. Move your mouse over the photo to see them.

Comments

view profile

Salvo Kalat says:

ciao gerlando, che occhi grandi che hai...!
Posted 11 months ago. ( permalink )

view profile

gerlos says:

È per osservare meglio, amico mio! Eheheh! :-)
Posted 11 months ago. ( permalink )

view profile

the_volpetta says:

Lo usi a mano? ghghgh =)
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )

view profile

atgrims  Pro User  says:

Ha utilizzato la vostra foto su uno scopo noncomersial circa un commison dell'esploratore fuori nel comune di Utsira www.utsira.kommune.no/politikk/kontrollutvalg /
Posted 3 months ago. ( permalink )

view profile

CristianoSpadoni says:

Sai che TechCrunch hai utilizzato la tua foto! (e naturalmente ha citato correttamente la fonte :-) Complimenti...
Ecco il link: www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/25/twitter-wants-t o-track-your...
Posted 3 months ago. ( permalink )

view profile

gerlos says:

Wow... questa foto ultimamente sta diventando molto popolare! Grazie a tutti per le segnalazioni!

@ the_volpetta: ci ho provato a usarlo a mano! Poi mi sono rassegnato, e mi sono costruito questo: gerlos.altervista.org/montatura-binoculare-pa rallelogramma

Da allora osservare al binocolo è diventata una goduria immensa :-)
Posted 3 months ago. ( permalink )

Would you like to comment?

Sign up for a free account, or sign in (if you're already a member).

[?]
view photos Uploaded on December 19, 2008
by gerlos

gerlos' photostream

99
uploads

This photo also belongs to:

Idee (Set)

21
items

GIMP users (Pool)

The Portrait Group (Pool)

digikam (Pool)

New & Learning (Pool)

Open Source Photography (OSP) (Pool)

Quelli di... Palermo, Italy ! (Pool)

experiments 實驗 эксперименты (Pool)

Aficionados con ganas de mostrarse - Fans with desire of would. (Pool)

Ricordi...emozioni... (Pool)

Tags

Click this icon to see all public photos and videos tagged with me me

Additional Information

AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved Anyone can see this photo

Add to your map