{"id":255,"date":"2005-03-25T19:57:34","date_gmt":"2005-03-25T19:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nargalzius.com\/blog2\/http:\/www.nargalzius.com\/blog2\/archives\/2005\/03\/2005_03_26_0357.php"},"modified":"2017-02-10T02:58:08","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T02:58:08","slug":"transparent-backgrounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/25\/transparent-backgrounds","title":{"rendered":"Transparent backgrounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fads nowadays is taking &#8220;transparent&#8221; desktop shots of your computers. Don&#8217;t know what I mean? Check this gallery out:\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/groups\/transparentscreens\/pool\/\">http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/groups\/transparentscreens\/pool\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I thought I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Basically what I wanted to do was:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Take a shot with me in it (pardon the <em>pantulog<\/em> clothing)<\/li>\n<li>Try it without a tripod (handheld)<\/li>\n<li>Capture decent ambient light so the cathode lamp of my Athlon rig can be seen.<\/li>\n<li>Shoot at an angle (meaning not straight on, which is what I see most of the time)<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 &#8211; which resulted in a significantly shallower DOP.<\/p>\n<p>I though it was simple enough but <em>boy was I <strong>wrong!<\/strong><\/em><!--more--><div align=\"center\"><div class='caption top'>The picture<\/div>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/nargalzius\/180358474\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"You may click on the image for more details in Flickr\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/46\/180358474_c5487eb62a_m.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div><\/p>\n<p>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 <strong>together<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>As you can see, the light, color and perspective from the LCD and room are still off, but considering the degree of &#8220;tediousness&#8221; this shot demanded, I&#8217;d say it was a decent take.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shot details<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Camera:<\/strong> Canon EOS 20D<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mode:<\/strong> Manual<\/li>\n<li><strong>Aperture:<\/strong> f8.0<\/li>\n<li><strong>ISO:<\/strong> 1600<\/li>\n<li><strong>Focal Length:<\/strong> 28<\/li>\n<li><strong>Shutter:<\/strong> 1\/25<\/li>\n<li><strong>Flash:<\/strong> Yes, +1 stop FEC, 2nd curtain sync<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Method<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Position stuff\/setting.<\/li>\n<li>Do test shots just to get the right values for your cam to balance out the lights. I still didn&#8217;t get it but the whole process was so tedious, I didn&#8217;t bother to redo it anymore.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>Switch to manual focus so your focus doesn&#8217;t get thrown off during your next shots (in my case, I was using <code>rear button focusing<\/code>, so I didn&#8217;t have to worry about re-focusing.<\/li>\n<li>Close laptop lid<\/li>\n<li>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 <em>somewhat<\/em> in the same position even on shooting.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>Take shot<\/li>\n<li>Open laptop lid<\/li>\n<li>Do numbers 5 to 7<\/li>\n<li>Open both images in Photoshop<\/li>\n<li>Make a selection of the viewable desktop area of the laptop (the LCD)<\/li>\n<li>Use that selection to crop the image of the &#8220;closed&#8221; laptop image.<\/li>\n<li>Copy and paste to new canvas<\/li>\n<li>SKEW the images (edit -> transform) until you get a rectangular, yet distorted perspective of the scene inside the LCD. This is because we&#8217;re shooting at an angle and since LCDs are FLAT, pasting an angled scene to begin with, <em>then<\/em> shooting at an angle again mess up the perspective.<\/li>\n<li>Set as wallpaper<\/li>\n<li>Do number&#8217;s 5 to 7 again<\/li>\n<li>Open picture in photoshop and do some more color balancing if needed. Adjust levels if needed.<\/li>\n<li>Rejoice as you have now made a contribution to the fad.<\/li>\n<\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fads nowadays is taking &#8220;transparent&#8221; desktop shots of your computers. Don&#8217;t know what I mean? Check this gallery out: http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/groups\/transparentscreens\/pool\/ I thought I&#8217;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 &hellip; <p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/25\/transparent-backgrounds\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Transparent backgrounds&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,10,12],"tags":[96,473,909,944],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-nonsense","category-photography","tag-apple","tag-general","tag-photography","tag-powerbook"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1764,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/1764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}