You must have seen the Eat Shoe, Tyrant! comic about the latest fad for the International Protester. I used my own shoe for the image, and shot the process of shooting the shoe.

Here are the two videos: First me shooting the shoe, and second, cleaning the shoe and making the webcomic.. A bit long I agree, and as for the background porn music… well those are the free tracks available on youtube’s audio swap.

I wanted to shoot the shoe with a seamless white background. I used some slightly reflective poster and put a slave flash (on the tripod) to shoot directly at the background. This helps in washing out the background. For lighting the shoe I used an external flash (on the camera) and the base of a lava lamp. The lava lamp bulb has a strong yellow color cast, and gives the shoe a dirty look.

I took a couple of shots, and finalized two. One whole shoe shot, one a close up for the caption. Step 2 below:

(This is a high resolution screen capture and you wont really see anything at this size. Visit this page on youtube, and click on HD on the video player bar there)

After importing the photos in Picasa, I used it to increase the highlights so that the background really washes away. Fixed sharpness etc and cropped the image. Then the exported photos go into photoshop. All these things CAN be done in photoshop, but picasa is a little faster. Rest is just plain old comic making…

Some day I’ll post a real time screen capture of how to convert a photo into a comic. In case you want to know something specific, feel free to add it in the comments.