toy

Bird-napped

colleague of mine pulled a little joke on a co-worker.  The co-worker had a little bird on her desk.  He took the bird, wrapped a napkin around it's eyes and placed a rubber band around it's torso, to simulate rope.  The bird is only 3 inches long.  Perhaps 2 inches tall.  His goal was to send her a note informing her that her bird was bird-napped.  He wasn't extorting money or anything.  It was just for laughs.

He asked me to photograph the bird, so he can send her a picture of the bird-napped bird.  We use large WACOM tablets.  I placed the bird on top of his tablet and used my tablet as a background.  Effectively making a semi-seamless.  I used a small lamp to act as one of those hanging lights we are all so familiar with when someone is given the third degree when being questioned.

Since I was using a Macro lens, I knew my depth of field (dof) was going to be pretty shallow.  I under exposed as much as I thought the image could sustain without muddy-ing up the bird.  I went into Lightroom; and I used the gradient ND filter effect to under-expose the image further at the top, bottom, and sides.  In the end my colleague loved it and our co-worker roared with laughter.

Bird-napped