Try It Too-sday: Rubberband Land

This week on Try It Toosday, I'm recreating a photograph by Nick Albertson that I squirreled away on September 11, 2013. The simple shape of the rubber band is repeated over and over on a stark black background.

Inspiration by Nick Albertson

At first glance, you might think that a box of rubber bands had been overturned on a desk and a picture snapped with a smartphone camera. But as I studied the photo, I saw it would take much more effort than that.

First, I had to find the rubber bands. I didn't have enough of the tan bands on hand, and my local store didn't have them, either. So instead, I used the tiny 1/2 inch hair bands I had. I separated out the black, blue, and purple rubber bands for this project.

With my light pad as the backdrop, I put down a single layer of black rubber bands. I used some tweezers to urge them into place. Then I turned off all lights in the room, turned on the light pad, and took the photo with only that backlight.

Next I added the second layer of rubber bands, starting in the center with blue. 

Since the blue bands I had weren't quite enough, I added purple on the edges to complete the second layer of rubber bands.

The magic happened in photo editing. After cropping and resizing the image, I needed to figure out how to make the colors mimic my inspiration photo. First, I learned to invert the colors. 

The white background became black

The black rubber bands turned white

The blue rubber bands became a light orange  

The purple rubber bands turned a light green.

Almost there!

The last step was to change the color of the rubber bands. I used the "Vintage Photo" tool in my photo editing program to colorize the photo. By using a sepia tone, the three colors of rubber bands look nearly identical.

Here's my final image!

My Re-creation of the Rubber Band Photo

Now compare it to the original.

Inspiration by Nick Albertson

These #tryittoosday challenges are quite the brain teasers. It's satisfying when I get it close.