The Egg's Nightmare

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Falling Eggs: More fun with laser triggers

Eggs falling through a laser trigger, this is composite of 2 different shots. Best splatter of the 18 eggs I tried. Lots of trial and error, even with the trigger and delay switch.

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Lighting Diagrams for Clay

Hi Clay, thanks for the comments on the previous post. Here are lighting diagrams for the first and third shots:

1) Essence: big white panel in the back lit with single strobe. Directly behind bottle there was the incense and then a black card just big enough to fill frame. This is the "dark field technique" from the book Light, Science, and Magic. This gave the bottle the edge lighting. Then, directly over camera, there was a stripbox laying on it's side. This frontlit the bottle and lit the smoke.





2) Plaything. Same white panel in the background, about 4 feet behind bottle. Lit with single strobe. That's it. Light came thru bottle, the clamp is handheld and silhouetted.



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Essence / Relax / Plaything

This week I was tasked to take some shots of perfume bottles. The task of the first 2 shots were to make the bottles appear sexy/alluring, and the 3rd shot was to be ugly/offensive. Worked with the Dark Field technique from Light, Science, Magic for the first one, was playing around with Thin Film Interference in bubble film while making the second, and worked with white perspex and silhouettes for the 3rd.



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Metropolis

catnip, water, Chicago, glass Those were the words in a brainstorming session that led to this photo:


I named the photo Metropolis, loosely tying the "Chicago" word to Gotham City and was thinking about Tim Burton's Gotham City in Batman Returns when I set up the shot. I used a wide angle lens and underlighting in an expressionist type treatment that he might have done. It was my best attempt transforming an onion into a city.

Now I'm browsing Wikipedia, and stumble upon this movie poster for the 1927 German Expressionist movie Metropolis. All this was probably connected in my subconscious, but I just didn't connect everything together until just now... Kind of eerie how "similar" they seem.



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The Vain Photographer

I was working on a project for class, opportunistically shot this idea on the side.

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The Beatle's White Rainbow Album

Well, like I said in the last post, I was thinking that a polarizer would help with the Beatle's White Album photo -- was hoping that it would reduce the glare in the plastic case just enough to allow us to see the cover art details and lettering a bit better.

I received two surprises:

1) Yes, the polarizer works fantastically well in reducing glare. I works so well in fact that we could see onto the album art, and see all the defects, hairs, kid stains, etc. in addition to the words The Beatles. I spent a great deal of time in Lightroom and Photoshop cleaning up all that extra junk. In the case of this simple album cover, I think I was better off without all of the extra detail.

2) The polarizer introduced a dreaded polycarbonate/polystyrene rainbow effect. The top image below is the non-polarized photo, the bottom image was taken with a circular polarizer. In addition to getting better detail of the insides of the case, you can also can see a subtle wavy rainbow pattern across the case cover.

I've seen some web postings and images where this property of these plastics was put to artistic use, mostly when light is put through the plastic (and I think I'll keep that in mind in the future when I want to do something similar). But, I'm not quite sure how to eliminate it as an undesirable side-effect. Was wondering if polarizing the source light would have any impact. Any other ideas on how to counteract the effect?

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The Beatle's White Album

So, in previous post I was discussing Light Science and Magic's suggestion of using a mirror to reflect a large (white) light source, and then using that as a background for a white-on-white shot. I was thinking that a good test would be The Beatle's White Album because a) it is white, b) the CD would be highly reflective which would raise the difficulty bar, and c) the album just turned 40 last year, so this would be a tribute shot.

As for lighting - this is a single large softbox above the mirror, but I also used a hand-held reflector in the front to add detail to the shadow of the bottom of the CD case. I tried white, gold, silver, and silver/gold reflectors. I initially thought white or silver would have been best choice but they seemed to make the photo a bit too cool. The photo above is with the gold/silver combo -- just enough fill light, and just a bit of gold to warm up shadows.

A note about 2 post-processing items: 1) the background was lit a bit uneven, RGB (244,244,244) to RGB (252,252,252) just slightly off white from left to right. I went into photoshop and used a levels-layer to map these background whites to a solid RGB(250,250,250) -- this is the "white" we use in class for stock photography -- we never output a straight white or a straight black. This is why you see it not quite-so-white on the pure white background of this web page.

2) As I remember in the Strobist's 102 lesson on "spectral lighting", when you reflect off of glass or plastic like this, you can still see through to the items behind the glass (like seeing someone's eyes behind their glasses, or in our case, seeing THE BEATLES behind the plastic CD case), but it somewhat reduces the contrast of the items behind the glass. I went into photoshop and selectively bumped up the contrast of the words to keep them from looking a bit washed out.

(Dang, now that I am writing this, I realize that *maybe* a polarizing filter on the lens could help in this situation. I'll go down to the studio and try it out and report back).

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