Today’s image has been shot using a lighting technique called ‘brightfield’. This is where the object, in this case a glass decanter, is photographed against a white background. Glass, and for that matter anything that is highly polished, is mainly defined by it’s reflections.  We have been conditioned from birth to recognise that a highlight, or bright spot on an object, usually indicates that the surface is reflecting light. Our brain interprets this as the object being shiny.

Photographically, representing clear glass against a white background presents an unusual challenge. To give an object depth, or the sense of dimensionality, you must have shadows. Blasting light at a glass object gives plenty of highlights, but without edge shadows it looks pretty flat and almost disappears. The solution is to light the white background only and a add dark, or black, background out of the view of the camera. The glassware picks up the dark background on it’s edges to give the dimension we need. The decanter used for this experiment has multiple facets, so these also reflect the darkness in any faces which are on a different plane to the lighting.

Following on from yesterdays post, we now have a bottle of white wine in the spotlight. Not quite as dramatic, mainly because of the absence of the strong red highlight colour. The aim here is to present it as crisp, clean and unfussy. I was tempted to do the advertising trick of adding a few water droplets, but resisted.

Another wet Sunday afternoon lighting experiment. I spent a couple of hours today playing around with flash heads in softboxes, to try and make a cheap inexpensive bottel of wine, look better than it actually is. Adding a small flash with a grid and a red gel to the background, and place reflective surface underneath turns it into a classic ‘hero’ shot. One final extra gridded flash on the label completes the picture. As usual there is more than one way to skin this particular cat, but this is the way I chose. My real aim was to keep the post production to a minimum, a bit of dust clean up and colour boost for the red was all that was needed. Job done.

The weather conditions have been pretty grim for the last few weeks, and not many plants are enjoying the conditions. This fella (why does it have to be male?) is usually more at home in blazing sun with very little water. I noticed that despite the conditions being the exact opposite to that, it’s petals were all plumped up and it seems to be quite happy waiting for the sun to eventually shine. Maybe storing all this water will send it into a growing frenzy when the weather changes for the better.

I went to turn on my desk lamp tonight, which has a daylight colour bulb in it for viewing colour correction prints, and it fell out! No warning, not so much as a by your leave. It didn’t actually shatter but left the screw base in the lamp holder. The filament remains intact, not that it will be much use now of course. Anyway, it seemed like a message so I suspended it with fishing wire against a piece of white paper and photographed it. Like you do.

So, from a photographers point of view, one of the worst possible scenario’s for shooting,  is trying to capture fast moving objects in near darkness. Monday evening found me shooting at Southdowns Dog Agility Club, who were kind enough to invite me along to photograph the dogs in action. I’ve photographed agility classes before, but usually outside in daylight. This was a real challenge. The club evening is held in a very large barn with around eight (relatively) low wattage fluorescent lights.

Most of photography is a compromise at the best of times, but I struggled with this set up. To stop a fast moving object in flight, you need fast shutter speeds. To be able to use fast shutter speeds you need plenty of light. Uh oh, so that’s not going to happen. Only thing for it is to use flash, and using flash means limited opportunities for using a motor drive to catch the right moment. Added to which, in a cavern of this size there’s nowhere to bounce light from, if you exclude the roof which is thirty feet above you. To get the best bang for buck from a flash it has to go naked’ without any softening modifiers such as a softbox or umbrella for example, which means that it’s going to be pretty dam harsh. Luckily dogs are not as vain as we humans, so they are unlikely to object. Ho hum. I’ll be better prepared next time around. I have a cunning plan, but only time will tell if it works or not. Watch this space.

I’d forgotten that I had this, found lurking in the bottom of the camera bag. It seemed like a good idea at the time of purchase. As I don’t take many landscape shots it’s probably going to waste. Of course, a few camera’s now have built in electronic levels, so I suppose it will be added to the pile of ‘stuff’ which will fairly soon be a modern antique before the paint has dried.

Whilst playing around with this glass tumbler as a photographic exercise I saw that, with the right light and angle, it was reminiscent of the wheel hub of a motor car.

It wasn’t until I looked at this back home that I realised how odd the point of view is. This is actually looking down at a set of metal rungs leading to some water. The end result is kinda odd, at least to my eyes!

Oh yes you are.