CameraCrazy

Inspired by a shot I had seen of a pair of glasses casting a heart shaped shadow onto a page of a book, I decided to try a similar shot. Unfortunately, my glasses are square and wouldn’t cast the shadow that I wanted. I decided to give it a go with my polarizer instead.

However, using a polarizer seemed a bit contrived (whereas the glasses setup felt more natural). Thus, I decided that a picture of a heart would complement the shadow. Perhaps I could use it as a biologist’s Valentine’s card? Alright then, how’s it done?

There were two tricky parts involved with setting up this shot. The first was getting the polarizer to stay standing. After 20 minutes unsuccessfully trying to balance it on my book, I used a small piece of tape attach it to the page.

The other tricky part is creating a nice shadow. This involved the positioning of the light-source as well as the type of book you choose. For the lighting, I turned off all other lights in the room and just used my desk-lamp. The higher the light is from the polarizer the shorter the shadow and vice versa. You can fiddle with it to suit your taste, but in this shot the light was just out of the top of the frame, almost right above my filter.

The second part involved with creating the shadow is the book you choose. A thicker book is better because when open, the pages curve more, creating a rounder heart. In this case, I used my copy of Gray’s Anatomy (2 inches thick).

This is the original picture straight out of the camera. Notice that the piece of tape I used is visible in the shadow, the page is a little dark (owing to the light fall-off from my lamp), and the shadow that’s cast is not uniform. The uniformity of the shadow will be important later on.

My first adjustment in Photoshop was to create a new levels layer to get the page a little brighter.

I then duplicated my image and burned the edges of the heart shadow a little more, eliminating the lighter spots. While I tried not to make a large adjustment with the burn tool, the gray edges picked up a lot of color and looked unnatural in the next step.

Using the color replacement tool, I changed the neutral gray of the polarizer to a classical heart red.

The next steps were to create a new color balance layer to remove the slight yellow cast from the page, as well as a small modification with the clone stamp tool to remove the last little piece of tape sticking out of the shadow.

Finally, a quick run through with the unsharp mask filter.

With this simple setup, there are numerous photographic possibilities. Play around with it, there are so many things you could change to get a completely different photograph with the same setup: the angle of the light, the distance or the light, the angle of the book in relation to the light. Perhaps try a different filter, a different book, more importantly go out, take some pictures and have fun.