Bright Idea

The bare light bulb.  The iconic symbol of bright ideas.  Tonight's project was to create a classic image of a light bulb with the element glowing  inside an otherwise perfectly exposed bulb.  Problems quickly arose: 1) We do not have any incandescent bulbs in the house anymore, we have gone totally compact florescent. 2) The only clear bulb I could find was in the garage. 3) It is tinted blue. 4) The bulb is coated in dust that is baked in place. 5) It does not have a traditional filament. 6) It is 120 watts.

I tried balancing the extremely high light output with flash, merging exposures as high dynamic range images, and merging layers in Photoshop.  None of these efforts came close to giving me the image I had in mind. 

In the final image you see here: the original has been desaturated to remove the blue tint, exposure turned down to give detail to the filament and bulb, and fill light added to give details to the brass socket.  Not exactly what my bright idea was, but it will do until I can get a more appropriate bulb.

JRT