107: Muddy Stones

This pile of muddy stones in the garden was nothing special, but I felt it was a good subject to play around with in post-processing. It had plenty of detail and not much colour, so I reckoned it best to make it black & white and give it an S-shaped luminance curve to bring out the texture.
I had a busy weekend of film shoots and meetings away from home, so not much time to take photos and post them. This one was taken one day late [and posted two days late,] but sequentially it's in order.

Settings: f/5, 1/800, ISO 100, P-FA 50mm.
Alterations: monochrome, cropping, sharpening & luminance curves.

046: Man of Mud

It's a small ornament made of mud, not dung; that had to be clarified now. Yes, such things indeed exist.
I reckoned my flash might have cast too broad a shine on the small object to give the tight-beam effect I fancied. So, like the photo of the wooden cat, my 1 watt LED bike light was chosen. After waving it around over the mud-man to find the most interesting angle, I taped the light to an anglepoise lamp to shine from the upper right.
The final effect is something like a mummy in a lit museum display. It's coarsely textured, contrasty and somewhat dead and nasty-looking. Also, seen this way, its form is fairly ambiguous; you might not recognise it as having a face the first time.

Exposure is f/4, 1/8 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42 & 19mm extensions. I applied some fine white balance adjustment afterwards, and a little [possibly unnecessary] sharpening.

This was taken very shortly before both the camera and cycle light battery ran out, one about a second before the other... Uncanny. It's like the mud-mummy's curse or something equally daft.