Day 56 - those escalators again

Another phone pic at the station, trying to use the long exposure to blur the steps. A bit wobbly when hand held of course.


Location : 1 Station Rd, Huddersfield, Kirklees HD2 1,

Day 55 - photographing metal... scoop revisited

It's the scoop again!

This time I've got it resting on a grey board.  One flash with blue gel and softbox is used to light the surface.  This is from behind and doesn't affect the scoop as it isn't directly reflected in any of the metal.  The softbox gives the soft shadow you can see under the scoop.  A second bare flash, camera right with 1/2 CTO (warming) gel is aiming at a white board camera left and gobo'd to prevent direct spill onto the flat grey board.  This is what you see in the surface of the scoop.

Day 54 - photographing metal... scoop

This is an icecream scoop, which presented rather more of a challenge than I had anticipated.  The shiny, curved surfaces reflect almost everything in the room, so controlling the look of the surfaces is incredibly hard.  This was a first attempt, however, so I'm not too disappointed.

This used two flashes.  One is camera left, with a gobo to stop flare on the camera lens.  This gives the two highlights on the edges of the scoop.  A second flash is positioned low down to light a white foam board above.  This creates the lighter area on the inner surface of the scoop, giving the separation between inner surface and outer front edge.

I've still got some unwanted reflections, but its as good as I could manage in an evening!

Day 53 - photographing metal... trophy

I'm working through a book on lighting at the moment so this week you're getting some experiments in lighting difficult things.  First up, shiny metal.  This is an old fencing trophy...

This was lit using a small softbox close to the right and a large reflector to the left.  The softbox is close to make it a large light source, giving a soft shadow and bigger highlight, but this also gives a stronger fall off of light across the image.  The reflector reduces this and provides a matching highlight on the other side. Both are kept out of the family of angles that reflect in the flat central part of the trophy.  This was angled to reflect the unlit ceiling, making it dark grey and making the writing visible.

Things to work on... the highlight is still intrusive, so perhaps using a bounce card or similar instead of the direct softbox would help?  The shadow is still a problem, so the softbox really should move higher to minimise it.  I'd need to be careful to keep its reflection out of the main surface though.

Day 52 - Sian and Anna

Much to the relief of my two regular readers, here's a picture of two Taylor girls.  Gorgeous, no?

There's another pic and the lighting info after the click

Day 51 - Tonight Matthew, I'm Eva Gardner!

Well, thankfully it isn't me as Eva Gardner, but our good friend Tracy giving us the Hollywood glamour look.

Strobist: YN 460-II into shoot through umbrella at 1/8 close camera right.  Sigma 530 DG Super at 1/32 high camera left.  Snooted Vivitar 730AFC on low power on the background from camera left.

Day 50 - Tristan

I had a lovely photo shoot with Alice and her little boy, Tristan today.  He's a lively, happy boy who's full of smiles, so it was a real pleasure to take some pictures for them.  This is one of my favourites from the day.