Behind the scenes of the Oil Lamp shot
 

Today I set myself a little challenge, photographing a bright shiny oil lamp with spherical surfaces that would catch almost anything in the room as a reflection. I realised that I needed to construct a light tent to control these reflections. Using two polystyrene pieces (rescued from the office skip) I placed a large lastolight diffuser and light the oil lamp from above using 1/4 power from an SB-800




The oil lamp image looked dull and lacked sparkle so I pondered how to record its shine without altering the lighting. I figured that skim flash may be the answer to I set another flash unit on identical power (1/4) aimed to just skim the oillamp and any remaining light would bounce off the polystyrene and have an overall positive effect. Skim flash did the trick, see below.

Excellent behind the scenes followup. Thank you for sharing your secrets.

Very good Stephen. Those polystyrene blocks certainly do the trick.

Next mission has got to be the Spitfire.:) ;)

Don

Should that not be:

"The next mission - should you choose to accept it - is the Spitfire."

Seriously though, the polystyrene idea is neat.

I cannot take any credit for the polystryene blocks, Don has one or more and they feature in 75% of all Don's shots.

Perhaps you are right Leif. The large flat areas of the wings will be very tricky. Serious thought required.

Don