I thought about your shot while I was out for my morning walk on this lovely spring day. The classic way to accomplish this on film (or digital for that matter) is to shoot the scene when backlit using large reflectors to light the sculpture. The sun should be off to one side or the other about 45 degrees rather than fully backlit, but it must be behind the sculpture. If the grass is totally in the shade you'll be able to nail it. For reflectors just use a couple of pieces of large white mat board or white foam core. Prop them up to reflect the light back on the sculpture or have your PAs hold them. (You do have production assistant's don't you?). Flag the sun if you have to with a black mat board to make sure you don't get any flare.
Exposure and processing will earn you very little with color film. Controlling the light is the time proven method to achieve shots like you describe.
Paul
On Apr 19, 2005, at 6:42 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
Hi Paul,
That's the thing ... it's easy to do in Photoshop, but I'd like to find a
way to do it outside of Photoshop, ideally using natural light, and making
it happen with film choice, exposure, processing, and so on.
Thanks for your suggestion about exposure ... 'tween you and Bob and a
comment or two made by another person off list, I think I know how I'm
going to approach this. After all, photographers did things like this for
years without Photoshop.
Shel
[Original Message] From: Paul Stenquist
Of course with BW you have the option of colored filters to selectively
alter the light. With color, it's tough to exercise a lot of control in
camera. More light on the rusted art with a reflector or diffused flash
would help. With negative film a bit of overexposure might help as
well. But the easiest and best way to do it is post process. And since
almost all color film is scanned these days, it's a simple matter to do
it in PhotoShop. As you know you can simply select the grass or mask
the sculpture and treat them individually.
On Apr 18, 2005, at 11:37 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
I know how to control contrast and tonality with B&W film, but how
does one
do it with color? For example, there's a piece of artwork that I'd
like to
photograph. It's rusted metal and the background is green grass. I'd
like
to photograph it in such a way that the grass is much darker and the
art
work is lighter, resulting in more contrast between the two. Is this
possible?
