DAY ONE

Happy New Year everyone! Today is the official start day of my 365 project! I am very excited about this project but I am also very nervous. I know how hard it is for me to continue to do the same thing every single day other than what's absolutely necessary. I know how sometimes I just want to stop doing something when things get tough. I know how critical I can be on myself. But I also know that I can do whatever I set my mind to. I also know that I've pushed myself through some tough situations and I can do it again. And I also know that while I have had my D-SLR for almost two years, I really didn't have a lot of time to devote to photography until now and I can't expect to come straight out of the gate as a professional. So I'm going to take this journey one step at a time.

This morning when the new year came in, I had a glass of Korbel champagne and decided that would be my subject. I stayed up past 2 am in the morning to post process and upload.

To practice lighting, I followed a tutorial by Nick Wheeler called Light up the Floor - A Floor Lit Table Top Studio Project.

I didn't have everything that Nick had in his tutorial so I improvised a bit.

Stobist Info:
The glass is sitting on a glass table that has a cardboard box underneath. Inside the cardboard box is my SB-600 set to 85mm at 1/64 fitted with a snoot and fired using a 1/8" cable. A black felt piece is on the back side of the box to create the reflection. The black background is about 3 feet behind the glass. I used two lamps with daylight balanced bulbs and diffused the light using a white trash bag that I cut in half to place each piece over the light.

I did lots of dust removal in Photoshop and I also used a Selective Color layer mask to darken the blacks.

Thanks to Nick Wheeler for the tutorial and thanks to my friends, family, Facebook fam, and Flickr family for supporting me.