Old Lantern

I asked my buddy if he has any cool objects at home we could try to photograph and he send me this lantern. So obviously I was excited to try to make some neat out of it.

Of course, this was harder than anticipated. First of all, those lanterns stink. A lot. We try to shoot in my storage room but I only have umbrellas for my flashes so it lights up the whole room. So we moved to the garage. I forgot to take a setup picture so this is approximate of what it looked like:

In the garage, we had a similar issue, the flash would illuminate the garage door but because we shot this in the evening, we opened the door. At first, we tried 2 flashes but it looked so boring and uninteresting. 1 flash at 45 degrees gives it much more character with the shadows it's creating on the right side. As for the smoke, it's crazy how much smoke you need to actually show in the picture. I used an old newspaper and rolled it. It needs to be fairly thick and make sure it's lit well before blowing it out.

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

There are many local adjustments for the smoke and the shadows. Clarity really brings out the smoke detail. I lowered the vibrance and in the HSL, I toned down the reds. In the tone curve, I lifted the blacks to give that older look. There's a touch of color grading to the highlights to give it a warmer tone.

I used photoshop to remove the string and hanger. I find it was distracting and this makes it looks "spookier". I also removed some reflection to clean it up.

50mm 1/8sec F/11 ISO 160

At first, I didn't think we would get anything interesting but simplifying it turned things around. More is not always better.