I was rewatching cherry-picked episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender when the cabbage merchant appeared and did his thing. I had totally forgotten about him. Every time I rewatch the series, I don't seem to remember him until he appears on screen for the first time. Then I remember his whole thing. "My cabbages!"– he exclaimed. Then, as I was daily driving my Pomelo at the time, a sudden hilarious idea appeared before my eyes. "Wouldn't it be super funny if I "dropped my pomelos?" And I started plotting how I would do such a thing.
The setup
I used my two LED soft-box lamps on each side, configured with cool light.
A backdrop of a colour very close to the colour of the keyboard to get that monochrome complementary-colour contrast vibe I was looking for.
Secured the keyboard to a rack using nano tape. I'm still a bit worried about the tape being detrimental to the anodisation of the keyboard. I'll see the more I do this, but for now, I only use my keyboards and not clients'. Just to be safe.
Also, I set a pillow below the setup, just in case. Just in case.
Mounted my camera on a levelled tripod and marked the feet position with painter's tape (just in case).
First and only attempt – I was so lucky
I aimed at four different shots – one of the keyboard alone with the backdrop to have more data to use in Photoshop; one for each position of the pomelo –I wanted it to appear twice on the composite– and a last one with my hands trying to catch the "falling" pomelos.
I swear I was laughing hysterically during the shoot. This was the silliest idea I've had in a long time!
Compositing everything in Photoshop posed a challenge, though, as I had never done something like this in a modern Photoshop version, so my tooling and resources were a bit rusty, but I think despite all that, I did a good job.
It was a good opportunity for me to take a look at what modern Photoshop offers and was welcomed by an array of content-aware tools that made my life so easy.
This is the almost final composite version, showing all the cropped-out photos in their final place. After that, I applied a bit of healing, cloning, and blending. Colour corrected in Lightroom...
...and voilà. The final result:
What would I do again?
• Use nano tape. The anodisation seemed fine afterwards.
•Locking the focus and shooting the minimal amount of elements first was a very clever move to have a cleaner backdrop.
What would I do differently?
• Maybe point the lights directly towards every face of the keyboard to avoid keycaps to cast shadows on the surface of the keyboard.
• If I use my arms again in a composition, I would plan my lighting differently because, to me, they look a bit unrealistic, despite the fact they were really there for the photo, haha.
Final thoughts
Levitation shots are super fun and translate directly into hard-earned lessons – I know the final result is not perfect, but I'm not aiming at perfection but at constant improvement here.
– Tanja.
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