Following yesterdays visit to WPF, I woke this morning with thoughts of shiny things. Stephen had mentioned having a go at photographing very shiny things, one of the things that is very difficult to photograph. Reflections everywhere. So for a first effort Stephens picture is very good. Another topic to post here. I am going to have to think about this one and how to do it with limited kit. This will be a case of making a light tent. Probably a circular frame using stiff wire that can support white kitchen roll. Cut a hole for the lens and fire the flash through the tissued sides careful to exclude the wire frame. All reflections apart from the lens will then be of the tissue. With careful positioning we should be able to do a fair job.
However my brain went off on a tangent today, but shiny surfaces were what gave me the idea.
I am unlucky in that I have not got a piece of glass which would provide a sharper reflection, but I have an offcut of perspex that I used for the windows of my lean-to. From my darkroom days I have some 12 x 16 Black/Grey mounting boards. For the purpose here glass and black velvet would have produced far sharper reflections.
Black velvet absorbs the light but black card reflects a lot back. When you look at the reflection in the image you will see 2 distinct reflections. The one from the top surface that I wanted and another off the bottom surface that glass and black velvet would not give. Proffessionals would use gloss black acrylic for a job like this.
This job is totally different from the others I have posted. With them it was a case of making the light as large as possible for makimum diffusion. For this stray reflections would be very obvious and not what was wanted. So black card was used to shield the subject. For the same reason only one light could be used. This could have been done with a portable flash fired through a diffuser. For that I would have needed an assistant, but as I have a studio unit my assistant did a bit of tidying in the garden.
The set up.
Black card with a piece of perspex on top. Perspex is a pain as unlike glass attracts everything. I nearly spent more time in Paint Shop getting rid of it than taking the picture.
Position the camera. For this it needed to be well above to get the reflection.
Decide on how to light it. - In this case as much directly overhead as my workshop layout would allow.
View the subject from the camera angle and use black card to get rid of each reflection you can see. Knowing where your light will come from stops you masking that area.
I used my camera flash to trigger the main light. If you look at the setup picture you will see it is directed away from the subject. It was also on 1/4 power so as not to have any impact on the exposure.
Exposure is a bit of trial and error as you have to set the camera manually. I did some stuff yesterday for the Macro thread so started at f16 and ended up at f22.
A trial set of pictures and then onto the computer. Even a x 2 1/2 magnifier on the review screen does not show enough info. A look at the best image from the test shoot showed that I needed to improve the reflections in the lens to give it more life. Also I noticed the colour cast was a lot cooler than on yesterdays pictures. I have attatched that image for you to compare.
For the final shot I changed the lens to a favoured portrait lens of yesteryear that I used yesterday and has a warmer tone. ( I am not a digital darkroom buff and so it was just easier. ) I also changed the position of the light and introduced the reflector to add reflection to the lens. The reflector was angled upwards so no reflections would appear on the perspex.
The test picture gives an indication of how much light is reflected back by the card.
As this is an advertising sort of picture you could have a go with mobile phone or any sort of gadget. Its all about creating a super glossy ' buy me ' image.
The first of the attached pictures shows the set up, the second the view from the camera, the third is the test shot and lastly the final result.
Don
PS Hurrah ... Kept loosing my connection while trying to post this.
