Computer Keyboard made of Clay

As a teen, I used to try and photograph circuit boards at low angles and pretend (sort of!) that they were strange landscapes in sci-fi films (a lonely and mis-spent youth!).

Now, still rather unwell and not knowing whether I was going to be well enough to go out snapping tomorrow (today?), I saw my Logitech illuminated keyboard on in the dark and it looked like a runway...

So, first getting little depth of field, tried the 50mm Nikkor f1.4 wide open - quite interesting. Then remembered recent acquisition, the very close focussing Sigma 20mm f1.8. This image was using that on full-frame D700 and I got the PC screen and orange and green LEDs in, too.

That made a reasonable image but whilst in Photoshop CS, I (sort of) had to creatively fiddle a bit. Arrived at this 'embossed' effort after others I tried looked awful - and you make think this does, too! You can raise the height and direction of the 'embossing', here it's done so much, I get a black number raised above the original white, whilst the out-of-focus 'blobs' and circles look OK, too! I then added an orange photo-filter to give it some body.

Like it or lump it, this sort of thing is fun to do and gets me a blip pic, whereas there might well not be one.