Is this image showing a photographer surrounded by apparently-floating camera gear Photoshopped, or was a special technique used?
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11Pentax users have super powers, its a well established fact. – rfusca Apr 16 '14 at 14:49
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But terrible judgement... ;) – ElendilTheTall Apr 16 '14 at 15:19
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I would encourage you to post a comment on his picture and ask directly. – rfusca Apr 16 '14 at 15:57
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2"Technique, i used for this photo: Telekinesis :))" It seems this answers your question :D – Kevin Apr 16 '14 at 16:47
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Please see PSA on “What's this effect?” questions and edit your post accordingly. Thank you! – mattdm Apr 16 '14 at 22:33
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I'm the photographer, who made the picture, and I used Photoshop to make the strings invisible holding the lenses.
This is not a composite. The picture was made from 1 shot. The CE logo on the lens confuses people, because it looks like it's upside down, but actually it's reflected from a mirror.
mattdm
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Ajnagraphy
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Photoshop has certainly been used somewhere along the line. Either the 'floating' lenses and flashgun were photographed separately in the same lighting conditions and then composited into the main shot, or the photographer used string or fishing line to suspend them somehow and then Photoshopped it out.
ElendilTheTall
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2Or he just dropped the lenses on a pillow and took a picture "in flight"... – Oleg Apr 17 '14 at 09:35
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It is photoshopped or gimped or whatever. On the lenses you see color fringes which probably come from working with slightly inaccurate masks on the composing.
Hermann Klecker
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It isn't a composite. The color fringing is caused by the lens i shot with. Cheap Cheap manual lens... – Ajnagraphy Apr 23 '14 at 16:14
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The lenses are most likely hanging from black cotton thread. That would be easy to edit out, if it was even visible at all. In particular, the lens on the left is at about the right angle for being suspended by a loop of thread around its top end; the one on the right looks like it would need two strings to support it.
However, having now read Hugo's answer about the CE logo not being mirrored, I now agree that the "floating" lenses were photographed separately and edited in. They may well have been hung from cotton thread to take that photograph: if they were arranged on a table, for example, the photographer would have had to edit out a lot of shadows. Oleg's comment made me realise that rotating a CE logo by 180° has the same effect as reflecting it so we can't tell if the logo is reflected or not.
David Richerby
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The easiest way to compose it in photoshop is by photographing the lens and flash on a contrasting background (e.g. bright green) and then use the mirror shot as a background. You can clearly see this is photoshopped because there is no reflection of the lenses in the mirror. There is also a depth error on the flash (it looks like it's behind the guy's hand). Also the text on the lenses is not reverted (you can see a clear CE logo on the left lens). The image is also heavily compressed (look at the low range of colors in the darker areas), compression often helps to hide composition artifacts.
Hugo
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@Oleg Rotating the CE logo by 180 degrees and reflecting it both produce the same result. Hugo and I looked at the backwards logo and assumed it had been rotated; you looked assumed it was reflected. But, actually, none of us can tell. – David Richerby Apr 23 '14 at 16:03
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