Flour Landscape

I was thinking that it would be cool to create a landscape shot indoors. It would need to be miniaturized of course. Because it's winter right now, I was limited in my options so I came up with a desert shot with flour. I knew this would be tricky and perhaps not even possible but I think this came out alright.

So what I did was look online for a desert shot. This is the one I based my shot on. Sculpting takes a lot of patience. I tried compacting and smoothing the flour as much as I could. Once you're happy with the shape, you take a flour sifter or a strainer and gently dust your landscape.

This is the setup:

We've got 3 flashes. 2 for the landscape and 1 for the background. The whole setup is close to a wall so we can create a hotspot with the flash. All flashes had orange-ish gels. I wanted to create sunset colors.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T3 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

When I took the shot I wasn't intending to have a purple gradient to the sky. I would've brightened up the background more with the flash. I also did focus-stacking. This was very difficult because of the lens's focus breathing. This basically means when you focus, the lens zooms a little bit.

I'll need to adjust the brightness of the camera LCD because I often get underexposed pictures. I should watch the histogram more closely as well. For the sky, I placed a gradient filter to add some purple colors. This made the biggest difference with the original picture.

50mm 1/160s F/16 ISO 160

Before using the strainer, I was very skeptical but after we softly dusted the landscape, I was really surprised. Sure, you can still tell it's not sand but the light and shadows plus the colored backdrop make it really nice.

If you didn't notice, I changed the camera from an X-T20 to an X-T3. The reason being my X-T20 had a scratch on the sensor which you can see in some of the pictures and it was really bugging me. The reason why I went with the X-T3 was the bigger size mainly. The weather sealing, dual card slots, faster sync speed, lower ISO are all very nice as well. Having an ISO dial and no modes make it a joy to use. Yes, the picture quality is roughly the same with the X-T20 or X-T30 but the enjoyment you get out of it makes it worth it.