This was another desperation shot. I realized at 10:30pm tonight that I had not gotten my picture this week and so began my looking around the house for something interesting to photograph. I have been keeping this Zippo lighter in my pocket for a while now and decided to give it a go. I slapped on the 50mm prime, set the shutter to 1/250, the aperture to 1.8, and fired an external flash in low light. The hardest part was getting the timing right. I was holding the camera and had to delay the lighting until just after I fired the shot. I missed the spark of the flint quite a lot.
Then, it was off to Lightroom to develop it into something the popped out. I edit all of the pictures for this project. I shoot in RAW mode so I can get a little better white balance adjustments.
See the above example of how the camera’s white balance was not very true or appealing? I also manually changed a number of other settings to give it the feel I wanted and there we have it. This is an art project, not photojournalism. I feel retouching things is just a natural extension of the process.