Marriage

After yesterday's misanthropic view on love -- my rather cruel and unusual picture "Divorce" -- I today return to my roots: The cliché.

(Update: When done reading this, have a look at my "Marriage Revisited" photo as well)

This photo is yet another attempt to follow the #TwPhCh group (Twitter Photo Challenge) here on Flickr. This week's challenge is "rundt" which is norwegian for both round/circular and around.

Here I've used all the cliché's possible: Love, circle of life, the bible, etc. The Bible is even open at the end of chapter 13 of Paul's letter to the Corinthians. You know the quote: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13).

But even so: It's a beautiful quote, and I cannot help but feel that the combination of elements looks rather good. Even though we all have seen these kinds of pictures before.

Technical data:

Shot with a cheap 70-300 mm tele zoom with 1:2 macro capabilites. That lens is pleasantly soft.

A flash is place a couple of meters behind and a meter above the ring, pointing down towards the book. The distance is big enough to create harsh shadows. The flash was gelled with a CTO filter to emulate sunset light.

ISO 100, manual exposure, 1/60 and f/8.0. TTL on flash, no compensation. The external flash was triggered by a flash on camera. No flash output from the on-camera flash. I actually thought the sunset effect was too obvious after processing the picture, so I desaturated the picture just a little in Photoshop Elements before uploading it here.

BTW: The ring's the same as on yesterday's picture. But I think the ring likes to model for this picture better than the last :-)

Update: The day after posting this I reached #273 on Explore (May 25), reached #111 the day after that and #57 on day three. Best after that: #50. It's been fun following this development; I think I've learned something about the Interestingness algorithm along the way. Anyway, thanks to everyone who has commented this picture and favorited it.

Update 2: I got third place in this week's Twitter Photo Challenge with this picture. Thanks to everyone who voted for my picture.