Where Have I Been?

It's been a while since my last post. Things have been a little slow around here lately since I pulled a muscle in my back a week ago and was confined to the couch for about four days. I'm mobile now, but not quite back to normal.

In other news, I'm starting a new job today so it's hard to say how much time I'll have for pictures. The first little while may be stressful, but I'll get something new someday.

I had to go back a ways to find a picture for today. I'm a computer programmer by day. I have a friend who has recently started a website (http://maritimes-jug.ca/) for programmers in my area who are using a programming language called Java. He mentioned to me that he'd like some sort of Java related image to put in the header of the site. It didn't take me long to come up with an idea for an image. Java could also mean coffee, which many programmers seem to run on, although I never picked up the habit. I thought mixing the two would be fitting.

Behind the scenes

Here's the original, unedited photo. I should have took a picture of the whole setup too, but I did not.

1.3 sec
f/8.0
ISO 400
18mm (35mm eqv. 28.8)
ambient lighting

I used a polarizing filter to get as much reflection off the coffee as I could. I wanted to have some bubbles and maybe some steam coming off the coffee, but with an exposure of more then a second, that wasn't possible. I tried using a straw to blow some bubbles, but they would pop during the exposure, moving the remaining bubbles and making ripples that would blur the reflection. I would have needed to add more light, which I didn't have.

For the reflection, I wrote a simple program (all it does is print "Maritimes JUG" on the screen). The different colours are done automatically by the text editor to help programmers read it easier and point out potential errors. Then I took a screenshot by pressing the "Print Screen" button on my keyboard and pasted the screenshot into GIMP and flipped it up-side-down so that it would appear right-side-up in the reflection.

I had two pieces of computer paper in front of the mug to reflect more light back up to the mug to light the side a little more.

As far as editing, it's hard to say. It was a while ago and I didn't write anything down. I know that it was cropped :) Other then that, your guess is as good as mine. Looks to me like the white balance was cooled down a bit to get a whiter keyboard, which also made the light part of the reflection in the coffee more blueish. More work to make the keyboard whiter should have been done. Then a curves adjustment to brighten the highlights quite a bit and darken the shadows just a little to bump up the contrast. Then the blur tool to smoothen out the vertical-ish lines above "String args[]" in the reflection. I'm noticing now that I was a little sloppy and blurred the tail of the "g" in "Jug{". I'm such a slob! Looks like the mouse cursor is just below "println", must have cloned that out. Then a little sharpening with the unsharp mask. And lastly a vignetting type thing to darken the left and right sides a bit to bring the viewer's attention to the reflection. I think that's it.