Transparent backgrounds

One of the fads nowadays is taking “transparent” desktop shots of your computers. Don’t know what I mean? Check this gallery out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/transparentscreens/pool/

I thought I’d have a go, and since a lot of the stuff I see there are hard to top creatively, I went on trying to add some difficulty to the shot so people can appreciate it.

Basically what I wanted to do was:

• Take a shot with me in it (pardon the pantulog clothing)
• Try it without a tripod (handheld)
• Capture decent ambient light so the cathode lamp of my Athlon rig can be seen.
• Shoot at an angle (meaning not straight on, which is what I see most of the time)
• Get a somewhat challenging DOP (depth of field), since I wanted to take as much of the background as much as possible with minimal blur.

At frist I shot it at f22 with FEC 2 stops up to allow a real fast shutter. It worked, but it would drown out the Athlons CCFL light and Powerbooks Monitor (which would kill the final shot). So I had to settle for a big-ish f8.0 – which resulted in a significantly shallower DOP.

I though it was simple enough but boy was I wrong!

The picture

This shot was no joke, taking into consideration the need for decent DOP using a big-ish aperture (to get enough ambient light in and not too much flash) and handheld to top it all off with normal indoor lighting!. Basically all those stuff I listed on top were a pain in the proverbial to do together.

As you can see, the light, color and perspective from the LCD and room are still off, but considering the degree of “tediousness” this shot demanded, I’d say it was a decent take.

Shot details

• Camera: Canon EOS 20D
• Mode: Manual
• Aperture: f8.0
• ISO: 1600
• Focal Length: 28
• Shutter: 1/25
• Flash: Yes, +1 stop FEC, 2nd curtain sync

Method

1. Position stuff/setting.
2. Do test shots just to get the right values for your cam to balance out the lights. I still didn’t get it but the whole process was so tedious, I didn’t bother to redo it anymore.
3. Focus on LCD screen (or the keyboard), or anywhere a third of the way of the frame to get decent focus and depth of field.
4. Switch to manual focus so your focus doesn’t get thrown off during your next shots (in my case, I was using rear button focusing, so I didn’t have to worry about re-focusing.
5. Close laptop lid
6. Choose a position to shoot from and get comfortable with it. What I did was put a chair, then made sure I was sitting against it and before taking a shot, I would hit my elbows on the back of the chair just to be sure I was somewhat in the same position even on shooting.
7. Use a focus point to align to some common point so that you can take a somewhat similar shot and frame regardless if the laptop’s lid was open or not (I chose to align one of the focus point somewhere on the Ahtlon sticker. Be reminded that you should NOT refocus.
8. Take shot
9. Open laptop lid
10. Do numbers 5 to 7
11. Open both images in Photoshop
12. Make a selection of the viewable desktop area of the laptop (the LCD)
13. Use that selection to crop the image of the “closed” laptop image.
14. Copy and paste to new canvas
15. SKEW the images (edit -> transform) until you get a rectangular, yet distorted perspective of the scene inside the LCD. This is because we’re shooting at an angle and since LCDs are FLAT, pasting an angled scene to begin with, then shooting at an angle again mess up the perspective.
16. Set as wallpaper
17. Do number’s 5 to 7 again
18. Open picture in photoshop and do some more color balancing if needed. Adjust levels if needed.
19. Rejoice as you have now made a contribution to the fad.