How to not burn your bed
To keep our juices flowing and keep exercising our creativity during the days of lockdown in Tel Aviv, our small group of photographers decided to start a photo of the day (POD) challenge, each of us submitting one photo every day. I'll be posting some of my favorites on social media, while this platform will be dedicated to the thought process behind them. I decided to use this challenge as a guide to my daily study of photography, pushing me to learn or try something new with each photograph. I believe documenting this learning process is useful on it’s own (as well as for the future), but there’s a chance it might be interesting to some people outside my head as well, so here it is, publicly displayed.
Now to the present photo. With this one I was aiming for a clean image, with a (kind of) Japanese aesthetic. The white circle is made out of a reading lamp I put against the dark wall of my bedroom and in front of it are dry flowers. I wanted to add something that would mimic the beautiful clouds or smoke sometimes seen in traditional Japanese paintings, and tried different ways to get some smoke in the picture. Unfortunately this was rather complicated. Firstly, by the fact this was all happening on my bed, and I wasn't ready to put it on fire (can you imagine, with a lockdown going on…). So any real burning was quickly (I admit, maybe not quickly enough) determined out of the question. I found the safest way to do it was to try and catch the exact moment when smoke is released by the lighting of a match, or from it's extinction in a ball of water.
The second problem with the “cloud” idea was technical and geographical. I would have liked to have the smoke closer to my source of light, so to reflect more of it. But since I don't own a remote control for my camera and have to use the timer, I'd have to press the shutter button for each photo. In order to get the smoke closer to the light I would have to climb my bed for each shot, but every time I'd do that the flowers would move and then get out of focus.
So I did what I could with what I had and after exhausting all my matches (real sacrifice for the sake of art when you consider the apocalyptical times when this is taking place), this poor trail of smoke was the option that fit the composition best. Adding smoke in post production is possible of course, but I enjoy the challenge of getting as much as possible in-camera.
In Lightroom I desaturated everything except for red and orange, both of which I skewed the hue of towards the reds and pinks. I added some luminance to the orange and added red to the highlights.