Burgundy Gauze Fundoshi - Up Close and Personal

Did you get what I just did there?  For this 'no design, no tricks' shoot of a burgundy fundoshi, I kept the camera in close up mode for the entire shoot.

 As mentioned earlier, I have usually done close up shots only after the fundoshi is on.

 I chose the gauze fabric for this because of its natural texture.

 Having the camera on a tripod does limit the angles I usually get from a hand held close up shoot, but the lighting and results were so much better. I'll just experiment in the future with different heights and angles of the tripod.

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Purple Gauze Fundoshi - Close Up and Personal

While doing the shoot for the non-designed purple gauze fundoshi, I realized I hadn't done a close up set in quite a while. 

One reason for that is the mechanics involved of using the camera in macro mode and holding it close to the body.  While the hand-held approach creates interesting angles, it presents issues with lighting and strange cast shadows.

 This set is a test of using the camera on a tripod, and utilizing the zoom feature in a well-lit environment. 

 It occurred to me that the close up shoots I've done have always been in the middle of a current shoot right after putting on a fundoshi. I took notes on the setup to then duplicate it for a shoot from start to finish in close up mode.

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Black Lawn Fundoshi - No Design, No Tricks

The reason for so many plain fundoshi lately is that I don't have many designed ones left to show off, so I've been holding off on the final designs...sort of savoring in anticipation of the end of the collection. 

This fundoshi is a black lawn fabric. The material is slightly thinner than the voile - but I bet you can tell that from the first few photos! 

It is quite comfortable to wear, and especially cool to the touch. 

 I do like how some of these turned out, revealing the varied transparency of the fabric, dependent on the amount of layers. 

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Lavender Voile Fundoshi - No Design, No Tricks

As foretold, another fundoshi shoot where the primary focus was to get the photos looking as much as the real setting as possible. 

 This time, the fundoshi is lavender made from voile. 

 For this particular setup, I used only one light source, so even though the backdrop was white, the shoot still came out nice and moody. 

 The color of the fundoshi also takes on a deeper hue than in more natural light. 

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Grey Fundoshi of Voile - No Design, No Tricks

Another in the series of natural shots with an undesigned grey voile fundoshi. Voile is such a light, cool fabric, it makes a great wrap. Since there is no attempt at photographic sorcery in this post, the photos will now commence....

 At times, you can tell how close I was to the camera by the color of my skin.

 When I move around the 'studio' (aka my living room with all the furniture moved around for space), the light is either neutral, or intense, which causes the colors to change appearance.

 Playing with light is fun...stay tuned for a drastic change of tactic!

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Purple Gauze Fundoshi - No Design, No Tricks

For this purple gauze fundoshi, as well as the next few sets of new photos, for the initial 'look', there isn't much trickery going on. So you won't be bored by all the photography mumbo jumbo for a while. 

 All I did from a post-production standpoint was to make the photos look as close to what the eye was seeing at the time of the shoot. This mostly involved a simple adjustment to the white balance since my camera tends to favor yellows. 

 Of course, there were many surplus photos, so stay tuned for some 'rehash' sets where there will be a bunch of photo-speak shenanigans going on.

There is also a set of close up shots in this fundoshi, showing the fabric's weave and folds....I haven't done that in quite a while!

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Fundoshi Rehash 44 - Plastic Experiment Take 2

The original plastic fundoshi shoot (found here and here) featured a rather washed-out version of the photos. Below is a sample from that session.

For the 2nd rehash of extra photos, I decided to go in the opposite direction and see how much color may be hiding in the digital information. To the left is how the photos came out of the camera. A simple increase of saturation and vibrancy resulted in the photo to the right.

This was a good start, so I continued by adding a curves filter, which brought out some yellows, especially in the skin tones. I liked what it did to the plastic, but not really to the skin tones, so I then added a levels filter and changed the tonality of the mid-tones a touch. The photo on the left has also had some of the yellow removed by another filter. 

This left things a little blown out, so I added my new favorite filter, polarize. After a bit of adjusting of contrast, I got the photo to where I wanted....voila!

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