plonq | Year In Pictures: 2010/03/04

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Yes, it's the other half of the lame joke I posted earlier.

My first couple of attempts to get this picture involved tossing the banana in the air and trying to catch it in flight. After a couple of near disasters, I realized I was only going to end up destroying a perfectly good banana without even getting a decent picture for the trouble. Reluctantly I fired up the anti-gravity generator and the results speak for themself.

As usual, I shot this at 100 ISO. I cranked the lens wide open to f/1.8 and set the shutter to 1/30th of a second, very slightly under-exposing it, but the banana was moving and I didn't want it to be blurry with a longer exposure. I compensated for the exposure, then selected the banana with a free-form tool, feathered the selection by about 85 pixels and lowered the lighting levels in the background a bit. The result is that the banana is now glowing in its anti-gravity field.

Since anti-gravity works via string theory, I applied an overlay and used Gaussian blur to remove the string portion from the picture. The result is a magical, glowing banana sailing through the kitchen.