“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson
This is most of my collection of Nikon camera gear with the exception of my D700 and 50mm 1.8 lens, used to take this shot. Certainly, I have quite a few other cameras and related gear, but these “little boxes” are what I’ve been using to capture the “fleeting little prey” off and on for almost 30 years now.
Here’s to another 30+ years too!
Day 142 of 365
To create this image, I shot the gear first on a white background – 3 bracketed shots. I processed the frames as a 32-bit HDR file.
In Photoshop, I straightend everything up just a bit, removed some of the dust (sigh, I need to clean these old tanks on occasion!), and did some color and level adjustment.
Then I used Topaz Glow and Impression for the charcoal / soft painted textured look.
The contact sheet image is a macro shot of set of photos I took way, way back in 1984 or so.
I processed it to color match the gear shot as best as possible, then combined the two using layer masks in Photoshop.
To finish the look, a scratchy texture was added to add even more age to the contact sheet and then a subtle charcoal paint look was brushed in via Topaz Impression to top things off.
