A Tale of One Image
You all know that I'm a bit of a photographer. An enthusiastic amateur. Recently, I went digital with a Canon EOS 5D, which I spec'ed out for an assignment related to my "day job". Digital is oh-so-nice from a learning perspective. Having access to instant feedback really improves the final images. Yes, I do try to set up the photos, and mentally, I probably visualize thousands of images. But I find that I always seem to have a stray branch or reflection or something in the actual photograph. Digital allows me to re-make the image quickly.
Last night, I made this wineglass image. I'm probably going to enter it in an upcoming Farktography contest(1). I am extremely please with it as it is visually interesting, almost exactly what I visualized, and I got to turn my dinning room into a photography studio for about an hour.
Glass is a very difficult subject to photograph. Highly reflective, it is also translucent or even transparent. The combination of those two qualities means that every light source will be visible, and any stray item is likely to be viewed through, or reflected, in the glass. The trick to the above photo was to eliminate anything other than the glass and the light sources that I wanted, and to make those light sources work for me.
Conceptually, I needed to provide edge-only lighting to the glass. The glass would then work its magic and all would be well. Schematically, it looks like this:
The reflector at the top would reflect (duh) the light from the strobes. I could have used one, but I have two, so... The "gobo" ("go-between") blocks the reflection immediately behind the wineglasses and provides for the edge-lighting.
Now that I had the plan, I needed to implement it.
Step 1: Get the kids to bed.
Step 2: Turn the dinning room table into a studio table and start building the set-up.
Originally, I planned to use my projector screen (I used to shoot slides) but it was too small - the glasses could not see the edges beyond the gobo and still give me working distance for the strobes and everything else. I found an off-white sheet (white would have been best, but you don't make images with the sheets you want, you make images with the sheets you have) and C-clamped it to the bookshelf behind the dining room table (which is why I do this when my lovely bride is not around). I built the gobo / backdrop from an acrylic tank I have and some black felt. I put the flashes down below the table top (so they would not get reflected in the glasses) and sync'ed them with some PocketWizards. When I made the final image, I turned off all lights in the house (and considered asking the across-the-street neighbors to turn off their porch lights, but decided against doing that).
All told, it looks like this:
And this:
Step 3: Make the photograph.
The camera went on the tripod and the shutter was tripped with a shutter-release cable. The little yellow clip on the top of the tank holds the felt gobo / backdrop to the tank (there's another clip on the other side). Originally, I did not have that piece of black paper in the tank. Without that paper, my gobo was too short and the wineglasses could "see" the top of the reflector. That caused a reflection in the top and front of the wineglasses which did not artistically contribute to the image. The paper increases the height of the gobo.
The purple dinosaur with the Cheerios glued to it was left-over from earlier adventures.
(1)I did enter it into the contest. I placed around 3rd.
Posted at 09:02AM Nov 16, 2007 by schnee in General |