Zane Llewellyn took first place in Grade B as well as the overall highest score in our recent ‘Easter‘ competition with the striking shot above. This is how he made it:

I had hoped to base my Easter photo outside in a field of daffodils near my house, but they never came into bloom like other years, so that and the wet weekends meant I needed to come up with a Plan B.

 

I’d picked up a couple of fun Easter decorations in the weeks beforehand and in the run up to Easter I found some of the kids stickers, so the eggs came alive.

 

 

One morning, I swapped out one of the eggs with the chick before the kids got up to pretend that an egg had hatched, when the early morning sun beamed in across the room and suddenly my mind started clicking!

 

I grabbed my camera and took a few shots, but it was on a wooden table and it wasn’t popping. So I got a black mat for the table and put a black reflector behind, it instantly transformed the image. The colours really stood out. Next I played around with different compositions and depth of field.

 

The final image was taken at f8 @ 160/sec, ISO640 since it was handheld using natural light.

 

I used Lightroom to do the basic adjustments, and then Photoshop to remove the wicks from the egg candles which I thought were distracting and I ensured that the background was totally black (Priest socks black!). It was nearly there out of the camera, but I knew that any dark grey areas would show up brighter on the projected image.

 

 

I learned a great tip for checking if it was black. In Photoshop, I inverted the image, so any areas that aren’t totally black are much easier to spot.

In the inverted image below, you can make out the parts that aren’t white, these showed up as dark grey on the non-inverted image.

– Zane Llewellyn

See also:
How I took that Shot – Finbarr O’Shea
How I took that Shot – Eileen Upton
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table