Egg Yolk Separator, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is an old-fashioned egg yolk separator. Yes, there really is such a thing! Phyllis found it in one of her drawers of household stuff. The photo is inspired by an earlier image of glasses.

I cleared my car out of the garage, and after the kids were asleep I set a small folding table in the middle of the space. Lots of electrical outlets, space to move around, but pretty dirty!

The lighting was a single Lowel Tungsten spot with mostly closed barn doors, positioned above to the left of the egg yolk separator. The image you see was made from three exposures combined in Photoshop. I used my Nikon D300, and shot the exposures at 2 seconds, 4 seconds, and 8 seconds. The lens was my wonderful old fashioned 85mm perspective-correcting macro, stopped down fo f/51 (this includes an adjustment for the magnification factor). I used ISO 100, and needless to say, a tripod.

In Photoshop, after I combined the exposures, I used multiple black and white adjustment layers to convert the photo, handling different areas separately in the conversion. I used a black and white adjustment layer to sepia tone, setting the opacity at 25% to tint the image.

Next, I used a LAB color luminance curve adjustment to increase contrast. The photo was looking pretty close to how I’d previsualized it, but I wanted just a little more richness. So I duplicated the image, and used the Photoshop duotone mode (with Black and metallic gold as the colors for the duotone).

Next, I blended the duotone version back over the original in two layers. One layer was set to Normal blending mode, the other to Soft Light. I used a low opacity (about 20%) for each blend.

It’s amazing what you can find to photograph around the house if you look for it!