In this video I'll show you how to take
a sparkler and a light bulb and create
an amazing picture at home.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV,
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the camera store that's got everything
for us photographers
and in this video I'll show you
how you can take an amazing
photo of a sparkler
and a light bulb in your small home studio,
so let's take a look at the setup
and it is really simple.
At the back I've got a small
sparkler and it's tiny.
It's a sort of thing you'll find in a cake
or maybe a cocktail.
In front of that is a light bulb.
This just happens to be a vintage
light bulb, which means there's
a yellow color to the glass.
You don't need that
but it looks good in the final picture.
Both of those are held in place by a
small piece of blue-tac
and I will see the blue-tac in the final shots
but fortunately it's really easy to remove
that in Photoshop. Now everything is
placed on a black glossy floor tile.
I don't need that as such
but it does two important jobs;
the first one it gives a little bit of protection
from the sparks
but the second job, it adds a fantastic
reflection below. Now when it comes to
taking the pictures I will need to turn
all the lights out and do this in total
darkness, but that doesn't mean to say
that the background will go black,
so I've got a black background there,
so you can clearly see the sparks,
so that's the setup.
What about the camera?
I'll be using my trusty Ben Road tripod for this
because the shutter is going to be open
for a full one second.
That long exposure
means I've got lots of time to capture
lots of sparks.
I also need a depth of field
that's quite large
so I'll use f/11
these sparks travel further
than you think.
To balance up the exposure,
I need an ISO 400.
How do I know that?
Well I've already practiced
and worked out the exposure
so you don't have to.
Now to get all those dialed in,
I'll need to be in manual mode
on the camera and I'm going to be in manual focus,
and I'm going to focus right in the
middle of the light bulb.
Once the rim lights are turned out
autofocus probably won't help.
The camera itself is actually lined up with the
light bulb and directly behind it
is the sparkler and that should mean the sparks
will come out from the centre of the
light bulb. Well, at least that's the idea.
Let's turn the room lights out,
get this lit and take some pictures.
Those pictures look really good,
but there is a bit of a problem with the light,
the sparkler is passing light through
the glass of the bulb but of course it can't
come through the metal of the bulb
so whilst the sparkler is cooling down,
I'm going to turn the room lights off
once more, get my lighter and hold it in front
of the light bulb
to illuminate the metal part of the bulb.
I'll take a picture of that making sure my camera
and bulb haven't moved
and then in Photoshop we'll bring everything
together and we're going to do that
right now.
Well the sparkler might have been small
and it didn't last very long
but I got lots of pictures in that short time
and of course the more sparklers you use
the more variety of shots you'll get.
Every one will be different
and this is the picture I've chosen to work on.
I like this shot because it's got a nice
symmetry to the sparks
and a great reflection below
but you can clearly see that,
well it is a little bit kind of
silhouetted in this area here.
Well that's where the final shot
that I took this one comes into play
because this one has that lovely color
and shape in the bottom of the light bulb.
Now you might think I'm just going to cut that
part out and paste it in
but one of the big advantages
of being on a tripod
is I can actually just take the whole
picture. So in Photoshop
I'm going to go to
select and all,
then across to edit
and choose copy,
I'll jump back to the other
picture by clicking its tab
and going back to the top
and choose edit and paste.
Now those two pictures are going to be
in perfect alignment and if you're
not sure, well we can check that
by going over to the layers and we now have two
layers. All I need to do is change
the layer blending mode
which is currently
set to normal.
I'm going to change it to screen.
Screen has a magic blending mode
where anything that is pure black
becomes totally transparent and we get
to see straight away that this
is perfectly aligned.
It looks great down here
but I have a Zippo that I don't need
and some weird reflections there,
so let's remove those but not necessarily
by how you might imagine,
in fact what I'm going to do is go up to layer,
layer mask
and choose hide all,
now that will remove everything
that I've just done
and that sounds like a backwards step,
but that's just made life a lot easier
because all I need to do
now, is to go to the brush tool,
make sure my foreground color
is set to white just
press ‘d’ and then ‘X’ if it isn't
and then I just have to paint right here
and I can just paint that area back in,
just like that
and there you go.
Now that blue-tac at the bottom
might need cloning out
but other than that, there it is.
My final picture is completed
and it has amazing
detail when you look up close.
Well if you've enjoyed this technique
hopefully you'll give it a go yourself
and leave me a comment below. If you want
to see more videos from myself
and the other amazing presenters
right here on AdoramaTV,
well you know what you've got to do.
You've got to click on
that subscribe button,
I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching.