I’m going to share with you my idea for a coffee table book, but don’t tell anyone, ok?
Once again, I have to thank my mum for this brilliant idea. She was always coming up with ideas for coffee table books. My personal favourite was ‘Beach Bums’, which was to consist of photos of people’s butt cracks on the beach. Arty- like and tasteful, of course (Once again, don’t tell anyone, ok?).
I like the idea of taking the mundane and making it into something interesting. Probably because I’m not really that motivated to go out and ‘do stuff’ and I feel incredibly awkward with a camera in public.
So what I do is take shots of shoes that are left behind.
Keep an eye out, you’ll see a bunch now that I’ve mentioned it. (I work in a shopping centre, so there’s always plenty of shoes left behind in car parks. I don’t know why.)
This pair I found on the street near my house, so I grabbed the camera and ran out to take a photo. You’ve got to be on the ball when taking photos of lost shoes. You never know if their owners will be back again to collect them, or if you’ll be going past the spot again to grab a shot.
This means that the lighting isn’t always desirable. With the washed out look of the shoes, I wanted to make the light in the photo look more sun drenched and golden than the light in the original photo.
So I put it into Photoshop and adjusted the photo filter (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Photo Filter, making sure colour is set to none, mode is normal and opacity is 100%), playing round with the dials until I had a look I wanted.
Then I put a vignette around the photo (find out how to do that in a previous post), darkening the tone of the photo and leaving the midpoint in place.
Before:
After:
Neat, right? What do you think? Do you have any photos of shoes you'd like to share? :)
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