I’ll bet that you are wondering how we made that really awesome looking egg in the upper left of the site.  If so, you have a real eye for talent.  That egg came from… a chicken and was eventually eaten.  This tutorial will walk you through the steps between Safeway and plate, primarily the steps where the egg ventured in front a blue screen (i.e. a primer wall that my roomie painted because blue paint is really cheap at Home Depot for some reason).

I started by getting the egg out of the fridge and placing it in boiling water.  Actually, I made two, I was hungry. The recipe is three minutes in boiling water followed by ingestion.  This time however, I decided to add in one more step: taking multiple photos of my meal.  I needed someway of supporting the egg so that I could later remove in photoshop.  I decided to sit the egg on the top of a two liter soda bottle (I really only chose this because it was handy.

The real trick is to find something to hold your object such that the support can easily be removed later on.  If you’re using a blue screen, make your support blue and it will be easier to remove later.  If you are like me however, and not wanting to let your breakfast spoil while the paint dries, you can just use any old object you find).

You will notice that the color of the background changes between the three images shown.  This is because the background is lit differently in each pic.  If I was being careful and wanting to save myself some time during extraction, I would light the background in a constant manner (i.e. have light source(s) dedicated just to the background).  In this case, I was really only looking for one or two useable images so the shifting background color doesn’t matter much, I will just extract each one separately.  

With my camera attached to a tripod I used a remote to snap the pics.  I started with the flash on the camera and experimented with the lighting my adjusting the shutter speed.  This varied the balance between light from the room and light from the flash.  I got some interesting results but the egg looked relatively flat, so I took the flash off of the tripod and used it remotely.  Now, I could light the egg from above, the side, or behind.  One shot that I particularly liked was the look of the egg with flash behind.  This made the yolk and part of the shell transparent and gave a lot of contras to a large drip on the front of the egg.  The only problem was that the front of the egg was now under-exposed.  Before venturing over to photoshop, I spent a few more minutes with the eggs.

Next - Part 2