Behind the scenes of the ' Behind The Lens ' shot.
The idea for the shot came from a couple of PM's with Nikon Foxy Bob.
The only flowers we have are on one fushia plant so that became the subject choice. The camera ... well thats the down to doing something a bit different. Lighting was by a single diffused flash, triggered by the SB80 on a remote cord and is just visible under the table. Exposure and focussing were manual.
I remember trying something similar in my days of film and I was able to make a print from 2 negatives. Achieving accurate registry in the enlarger was the biggest problem so it was not that easy. Not a problem with digital as long as register was maintained at the time of shooting.
The camera with the prism attached was set up as in the attached pic. Once F3 focus on the flower was achieved the prism was removed, taking care not to move the F3. To enable viewing of large images to check for effect, the D100 was controlled by a laptop. Two images are attached, one to show the effect of the focussing screen image through using a single exposure for camera and flower, and a seperate one concentrating on the focussing screen, where the light fall off on the camera, from the flash, was controlled by black flags. Camera position was quite critical to stop the blackout effect from the split image of the focussing screen. ( focussing aid before the days of A/F )
Frustations, there were some. Due to seriously limited space a knock of the tripod meant resetting and re shooting both sets to maintain register. This happened as I moved the flash between the two exposures. Camera battery running out of power then finding after recharging that the flower had moved - see BS 3.
Despite thoroughly cleaning the camera before starting, dust specks miraculously appeared and were made very obvious with flash. More time was spent cloning these out than combining the images.
The final image is also attached to save returning to the gallery.
Don
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