What a day I’ve had! I was scrolling around on YouTube watching stuff on photographic lighting for Still Life pictures. Now you know when you ask YouTube for something, it gives it to you, but every 4-5 vids, there is something that’s not really what you searched for. That’s what happened. There was a video that was talking about the Pep Ventosa Technique and the picture they had of a tree was both stunning and surreal. My little ADD brain was like “What is this, now?”, so I started watching the video and it was a wild technique that I had never thought of. Then I decided to look up Pep Ventosa and when I found his website I almost fell out of my chair! The stuff was amazing!
The quick and dirty explanation is he circles an object taking pictures from all sides. Then, in Photoshop he stacks all the photos as layers. As he goes higher up the layer stack, the photos are given progressively less opacity. That’s the basics of it. Of course, you can use blendmodes, or layer masks to remove stuff you don’t like or any other thing you can think of.
Now, here in San Antonio, its 108 degrees outside (literally…not an exaggeration) so I am not going out to find myself a tree to try this out with. But it dawned on me that there was a bouquet of flowers on the table. So I thought about how I could circle it and how all the backgrounds would be the kitchen, the dog eating, the tv, etc. So I thought, instead of me circling it with my camera, what if I make the camera stationary and just rotate the vase? So that’s what I set out to do. I still didn’t want the kitchen in the background so I took a couple of pieces of white poster board and hung them behind the vase on a couple of light stands. I but another piece of poster board under it. Then I set up my strobe, mounted the camera on the 3 legged thing and got started. I started by marking two spots on the posterboard that the vase was on, one on each side of the vase so as I spun it I could keep it in the same position. I’m not going to post all 18 shots I took, but I’ll show you the first one.
Once I was done shooting, I went to Photoshop, imported the pics as a layer stack, and got started. The one above was the base and at 100% opacity. #2 was at about 60, #3 was about 53, and so on. This gives it a somewhat blurry, painterly look, but I never used any blur or any paint filter. In fact, the only filter I used was Camera Raw (I love that thing) to add finishing touches.
Now, unlike a tree outdoors, I had used a solid white background so while the vase looked great, its background didn’t. I just used some textures and painted the vase and flowers through them with a layer mask. The top photo is what I ended up with and while, its not even in the same league as the stuff pep was doing, I think it looks pretty good for a first effort. Hope you enjoy it!