Christmas tree. Plus six clicks.
It’s Sunday. It’s Sliders Sunday. It’s time to create some modern fine art…
No I don’t really take myself that seriously, but I do try and have a little fun :)
In January I took around 40 ICM shots of the lights on our Christmas tree, mainly rotating the camera around its lens axis to get circular patterns.
The results are interesting because rather than a solid streak that you might expect from a light the LED produces a set of dashed lines: lacking in a hot filament the bulb oscillates in brightness with the voltage.
This is image and the other two very different variants today are all based on a stack of around eight of these images combined using the outlier operator.
Although they can sound advanced stacks are easy and quick to produce if you have the right software (I was using the low cost Affinity Photo).
Once you have built the stack you can scroll through the options for the operator that controls the combination and quickly see what each looks like. They are totally unpredictable in my experience so you need to just try them all.
This is my favourite variant, for today anyway. I just like the glass ball effect and the curves. Doubtless I’ll have changed my mind by morning :)
Yet it was the simplest to make. All I did was convert it from Rectangular co-ordinates to Polar co-ordinates and that was it.
Being the sad case that I am I went back and counted the mouse clicks from having selected which images to stack to the final look: six clicks and there you are.
Actually that’s not quite what I did, because as you might imagine for me there was a bit of messing about with the colours and the contrast and sharpness, but the basic look was there in six clicks.
I’ll post links to the stacked image and a typical in-camera ICM from the collection in the first comment.
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :)
[Around eight ICM shots stacked in Affinity Photo with the Outlier operator.
Upped the black level in Levels to get rid of some of the residual ambient light. Clarity adjustment for sharpening.
Rectangular to Polar transformation.
Changed the colours a bit using hues shift in an HSL adjustment and Curves in LAB mode, to get a pleasing balance between red and blue.
Sharpened using High Pass and Linear blend to thicken the lines. Brightness and Contrast to balance the tones. Frame and drop shadow.]
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