3 lights, f/29, 1/250, ISO 400I loved this assignment. I could do work like this all day long and have no problem with it! It’s fun to play with all of the possibilities for glass and for the metal. Josh and I just started brainstorming and I had ideas for him even though I wasn’t shooting the metal stuff. Even though we weren’t able to spend as much time on this as we would have liked, I was really happy with the out takes. My big problem with the shoot was how dirty the light table was. I cleaned it before hand, and then I was going through my outtakes and all I see is dirt and spots, and I’m sure there are a couple of spots that could be my sensor or on my lens, but not all of those. There’s no way. In the corners of the photos, there is spottiness that doesn’t even look like dust, it really looks like something on the table. So it was irritating to go through the take and not see it when I was shooting.
I tried to get some different angles that I hadn’t seen used on glass before, and while I know the content could be better, I love martini glasses and really liked the black line type of lighting. I think that it looks really cool and I wanted to try to use my painted glasses to get the black line effect and but still get the paint on the glass to show up in detail.
For all of the shots, I used a three light set up and ended up turning everything down 1 and ¾ stops. I had a soft box over the top set at 150 watts and stopped down by 3. It was arranged over the top and slightly to the back to highlight the rims of the glasses. This was especially effective when I had stacked the glasses and it was a tall set up. Behind the light table I had a backlight with no modifier stopped down by 2 and at 150 watts. I tried to keep it close to the table, but I think in the end I backed it up a little bit and pointed it down a little more towards the floor where I had a large piece of whit paper under the table. I also had a snoot pointed at the white paper so that I could get the light to bounce up underneath the glass through the table. The snoot was up full at 600 watts. I didn’t have to make a tent for any of this because I didn’t have trouble with the glass reflecting.
As it turns out, and I have recently realized that I used an ISO of 400 instead of shooting at 200, or 100. I was really careful this time to check everything and turns out I forgot one. The select is shot at f/29 and 1/250. Everything was shot between f/22 and f/36, and I played with some of the settings and went between 125 and 250 for my shutter speeds.
I thought about re-shooting this when Josh and I came back to shoot his, but the table wasn’t going to get any cleaner, and while I had some other ideas, I liked how the selects I have turned out. I thought about re-shooting when I had Josh drop the dye into the water to see if I could get those to turn out better. The ones from the top ended up being under exposed and I didn’t realize it while I was in the studio.
I’m a big Yahtzee player too, and I liked the idea behind using the dice and being able to make the colors and the details show up in the photo with such a strong backlight. The other thing that I couldn’t figure out how to fix was the lines in the photos horizontally that were made with the light on the table. I kept moving the lights and it wouldn’t fix it, so if you guys have any ideas what is going on with that in the outtakes, let me know. I did want to try to create a double halo, but that didn’t end up working out in my favor.
As for content, I thought that the glasses with the dice made a nice reference to drinking and gambling and how they seem to go hand and hand. I added the color to the water for different flavored martinis, and had thought about getting different fruits to put in the water, and then looked and John Hook’s photos with the jell-o and fruit, and didn’t think I would be able to do that better than he did. So, I did it with out and just tried to create something visually stimulating.
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