How to….

So now we have to do a how to session…  I’m going to explain how I took this

to this

 

First,  I took  the base exposure and I under exposed the crap out of it to create the illusion of night.

Next, while keeping the images under exposed, I simply walked around the mailbox with my flash and lit it from various angles and directions….

o.k., I think you get the idea…

Next, I opened all the images in photoshop.  I took the first exposure (the really under exposed one) and used it as my base image.  I took the rest of the images, using the move tool, and draged them all on top of  my base image creating many separate layers.  Then,  layer by layer…   I created a mask layer on each individual layer and painted with black in the areas I wanted to highlight or show.  After that, I inverted each specific layer to let the pained areas show through.  Again, I did each layer one at a time, layer by layer….  After that, I tweaked the tonal values and added a high pass filter for a punchy contrast effect.  And that’s how it was done!