Screwed

[Mike Buckley]

As nice as Iceland was, it's also nice to be back in my makeshift studio combining two great hobbies -- wine and photography. C&C encouraged, as always!

[Karm Redland]

Mike, it is a creative composition. Interesting.

Karm

[Sergio M.]

Mike, the camera had to be on a tripod. There's no way you were hand holding the camera after all that wine.

Two great hobbies and a cool way to immortalize both.

Serge

[Mike Buckley]

there's no way you were hand holding the camera after all that wine.

rotflmao!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Bobobird]

The things we do to get a shot. That now is a lot of wine to have gone through.

[Donald]

Good selection of wines there, Mike. I hope they were all good.

[pnodrog]

No Champagne! Maybe you started with it so the cork is at the bottom - a good nights work. Did you get any help?

[Mike Buckley]

We have no champagne drinkers in our household. However, in the three bags of corks that I used (I have about six bags), I did have to weed out two champagne corks surely brought to our home by friends. Sorry about that!

By the way, the original champagne was a still wine, not a sparkling wine, that would have used the type of cork displayed in the image. I don't remember when the winemakers of Champagne began making sparkling wine in commercial quantities but they did so to appeal to British tastes. Thomas Jefferson, the first American connoisseur of wine, and the French of the 18th century preferred still Champagne. Sparkling wine was shipped to Britain for centuries before it caught on elsewhere.

I have searched for a bottle of still Champagne but so far the closest I have come to it is the advice of a French winemaker. He told me to buy a bottle of sparkling wine and to leave it open for a week.

[CLK]

What a great idea. I was wondering if there was something that could be done with all of our corks. We accumulate them and take them to the store where we buy the wine and they recycle them. Since we don't do it often it is rather embarrassing when we do get around to it. I may have to play with ours before they go. Did you do any PP on these to bring out the darker colors in the corks or were those just good old reds?

[Mike Buckley]

I had no idea that wine stores would recycle corks. Thanks for the idea, Connie! If I were to walk into a store with bags of corks, I wouldn't be embarrassed; I would be proud!

There was nothing special about the post-processing, at least not considering the image. I selected the black background and significantly raised the black point to ensure a total black devoid of detail and variation in color. After applying a normal S-curve to the corks, the image didn't have the pop that I had in mind. So, I selected the lettering on the corks and darkened it just a tad. I then selected the brighter tonality of cork and brightened it slightly. Only the corks and corkscrew are sharpened. I tweaked the corkscrew to make up for deficiencies in the capture that I decided early on would be easier to fix during post-processing than by making changes before releasing the shutter.

By the way, my wife asked if I carefully positioned the corks this way. I wanted a random look so I randomly piled them up. One synthetic cork that accidentally found its way into the mix in a prominent position was distracting, so I put a natural cork in front of it. Another cork had a big black mark that was right in line with the corkscrew, so I turned it around to hide the imperfection. The only other aspect that wasn't random had to do with the composition: the shape of the mound, a path that was cleared between the camera and the corkscrew, avoiding dark corks placed immediately behind the screw to ensure sufficient contrast, and the space between the top of the mound and the corkscrew handle.

[terrib]

It looks like you did a great job of lighting and making the few changes to the random pile that you did to make this work. Very creative! Not something I would have thought of for sure.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Terri. My plan to light the corkscrew with a flash and snoot went awry when I couldn't get my flash to turn on. I improvised using only a very small portion of light provided by a hot light.