Magical Book

This technique was featured on the The Strobist blog a good few months ago but I just had to try it. I know it's copied but isn't that what part of all this is about. The basic idea is copied but everyone's rendition of it is different. I'm reasonably happy with my results from this first attempt but there are a couple of things I may change on the next attempt. A little bit more ambient on the back of the book might work well as would a bit more depth of field. I had to open up the aperture to f4.5 to get the ambient up to this level. Shutter speed was 1/60th second. Increasing the ISO would gain me some depth of field by allowing me to stop the lens down by the same number of stops. The flash was on minimum power of 1/128th with a sheet of white paper wrapped around it to diffuse it. If I want to close down the aperture to achieve more depth of field while keeping the same ISO I will have to provide more light on the back of the book. Doing this under higher ambient light conditions will raise the background light which I don't really want. It may be necessary to use a second strobe through an umbrella in front of the subject on very low power and a reasonable distance away.

Specular Background

The image on the left is my attempt at the latest Strobist assignment. The idea is to photograph a subject with a shoot through umbrella and strobe. The background should be semi reflective. This will enable you to set the shadow side of the subject against the reflection off the background. It is a nice effect.

My attempt here took quite a bit of experimentation to get the angles working. I've seen other examples with the reflection completely surrounding the head which look neat. I've haven't managed to achieve that yet.

Cooking Light

The first 'proper' assignment posted on Strobist is called Cooking Light. It basically requests an image of a kitchen object for a catalogue or restaurant wall. The idea is to use the techniques covered so far. I spent a good couple of hours messing around with kitchen utensils to try to find something suitable. The application of decent light to most of the items in the kitchen highlighted nicely how scratched they are. Glasses were particularly disappointing. You'd think we loaded our dishwashers with sand in New Zealand. I finally settled on a close up shot of our Campagnolo corkscrew, if you happen to be a cyclist you will appreciate that Campagnolo make the best road cycling componentry available. Anyway that is definitely off the subject. I was a bit worried that I had gone for an easy subject but in the end I'm reasonably happy with it. There are nice highlights on the screw and the rim surrounding it. The timber of the table on which it rests matches the tones in the bronze material and the subject to background lighting is balanced. The nearest arm is out of focus and this maybe does not work. There are some amazing examples posted by other Strobist readers in response to this assignment.

Specular Highlights

The next exploration of aspects of lighting on http://www.strobist.com/ is concerned with the control of specular highlights. That sounds flash doesn't it (no pun intended). This is just the technical term for the usually blown out bright spot on a subject that is the direct reflection of the light source.

The first example image demonstrates this phenomenon rather crudely. The flash umbrella used as the light source is clearly visible in three three spoons. This shows how different apparent light sizes could be used to create a slightly different effect. the other feature of this image is the usually undesirable reflection of the photographer and camera. The on camera flash is visible even though it was set to not trigger. The reason for this is that I am using the Nikon CLS system to trigger the off camera flash. The on camera flash cannot emit the infra red signal without a tiny amount of visible light. Normally this would not supply any discernible light to the scene. The case of a direct reflection is an exception.

The second image is better in one respect. Altering the camera to subject angle has eliminated the photographer's reflection. the spoon shape is quite tricky for managing reflections, with a flat subject it would be easier to visualise when the specular highlight will appear in the image. The third spoon image shows the spoons positioned so that the top spoon has no specular highlight, the second a tiny and the third some more. That ugly photographer is back though! Also of note in this image is the white bar which is a reflection of the edge of the plate on which the spoons are resting. The possibilities are limitless, the challenge is taking control of the variables.

The last two images in this post are not included to illustrate anything about specular highlights

but they do quite nicely show the usefulness of a tiny amount of on camera flash to fill in a shadow side of a subject. This coffee pot is a potential nightmare of unwanted reflections. The first shot is taken with just a large translucent umbrella to the right. There is a fairly deep shadow on the left of the pot. A small amount of on camera light has reduced this. The final result is an evenly lit coffee pot with definition between the many different surfaces. The rim and spout are catching the light nicely to show the subject shape.

I must be honest, this is not the sort of photography I normally enjoy but I feel that I am learning so much by playing with these inanimate objects. A human subject would not tolerate this amount of experimentation.