This is my first ever submission to DPC. I have a newfound respect for the work that must be involved in submitting a good entry. At my skill level, the several hours that went into this did not produce a satisfactory entry. I'm submitting anyway, because I want to get better at this.
Obviously, this is an attempt to recreate Moon Over Half Dome with ice cream, a sugar cone, and a spoon. This turned out to be much more challenging than I thought. I spent a lot of time getting the lighting where I wanted it, and am relatively satisfied with that piece of it except for the shadow of the spoon on the backdrop. I used a reading light with newspaper around it to create a spot, then I held up some tissue paper to cast a shadow on the cone but hopefully leave it recognizable.
The biggest problem, oddly, was molding the ice cream. I really thought I'd be able to do a better job recreating the look of half-dome. It did not help that it is 80 degrees here in California. I tried to stall the melt by setting the whole thing on ice packs. It did help a lot, but not enough.
By the time I got an exposure that I was relatively satisfied with, the ice cream was too melted to take any further pictures, and I had not noticed that the spoon had migrated out of position.
If I had time do fix this, I'd buy some fresh ice cream then
- jack up the air conditioning
- put a greater tilt on the cone
- move the spoon over the dome (this would probably take care of the shadow as well)
- probably use a slightly wider aperture, though I didn't really like the look of the blurry spoon either.
Very little post production obviously... Sharpened and bumped the contrast a bit in iPhoto.
Criticism is welcome and appreciated.
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Welcome to the challenges. For the voting and scores, it helps to remember your purpose in submitting - to learn, instead of to gather scores. Sometimes comments help with that, sometimes not. But you can always learn from having attempted to meet a challenge and then noticing in detail how others approached the topic. Still, you were not last place.
As you have discovered, along with many of us, studio set up shots are not easy. Your subject is complex. Moving the background further away would eliminate some of the distrating variation. Not sure why the spoon appears out of focus, but that does diminish the visual appeal. Consider reading up on all the different factors that affect depth of field besides the f stop.
ROTFL! Major points for the title and the attempt at humor. The execution of the image is horribly "bad" from a conventional perspective: I'm not sure but what that may not be entirely intentional on your part, not that it much matters...
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