Photo Challenge Week 35 Landscape: Nature Up Close

A nice and simple one this week. Nature photography is always a lot of fun, even if you shoot the same subject repeatedly there is always a different light, angle, focal range to explore that can make an image look entirely new.

Bridgnorth Music Festival 2016

What a weekend! The last few days have been hectic, with concerts and music festivals, family barbecues and a Princess and Pirates party. We spent time with some of our favourite people and Rory got to meet a new friend. All in all, a brilliant bank holiday. Here's some of what we got up to at the Bridgnorth Music Festival.

Photo Challenge week 34 Portrait: Child

My daughter has been centre stage for so many of the portraits in this challenge, but what can I say? She's cute!

Product photography light tent - Part 2: Flash

 In the second half of this two part post I look at incorporating flash with a light tent setup for product photography. It's only in the last year or so I've begun to explore the possibilities provided when using artificial light, up until this point, the endless options always seemed so complicated and intimidating with the vastness of choice. I always felt my equipment wouldn't be good enough, or if I wanted to achieve certain results that I needed specific things, things that would cost a fortune, but that's rubbish. Sure, having a top end camera is wonderful if you can afford one, and having a fully equipped studio is amazing, but a photographer's gear is only ever as good as the photographer. And personally, I think cutting your teeth on basic gear will teach you far more about photography as a medium than high-end gear used on auto settings ever could. 

Anyway, my point is, that these two flashes cost me about £30 each and I assumed that their cheapness equated to crappiness so I rarely used them, when in reality it's just that their settings are limited. They're manual flashes, they don't 'talk' to my camera, so I have to imput the settings myself. But that just taught me how to imput the settings myself! And sure,the batteries will probably run out faster and the bulb will probably die quicker and they don't have all of the bells and whistles like a super fancy Canon speedlight, but they get the job done and pretty well I think.

5. The first setup is the same as the very top image. Two flashes, both diffused by the sides of the tent. Both lights also had additional diffuser heads, just to try and even out the light but as you can see in the top shot, the right (Centon) flash was brighter than the left (Neewer) flash.

6. Two flashes with one side of the tent down. The brighter flash on the right paired with the lack of diffuser on the left made a more even exposure, but also an annoying double shadow on the upright bottle shot

7. Single diffused flash on the right which was bounced by the wall on the left.

8. Single flash on the left without wall up as a diffuser made my favourite shots in both the vertical and overhead shots of the bottle. I love the cross lines made by the orange shadow of the liquid. Theres nothing like a good single light shot!

9. Diffused flash (right) and silver reflector (left). Probably the best exposure for the overhead shot but made the vertical one a bit flat

10. These were taken by lying the reflector (silver side down) and aiming a flash up at it, bouncing the overhead light down into the cube.

11.The above, vertical shot was a single backlight, but for the lower image your guess is as good as mine. I think I laid the flash (left) down and shot surectly at the bottle from one side, but I can't be certain. It's pretty though and worth sharing :)

12. Backlit and with a flash to the right, both through the diffuser walls.

13. Bottle elevated to eliminate the 'floor' which was a considerably different tone and wasn't looking how I wanted. One egg-cup platform later and it was perfect.

And that's it! I hope you found this interesting, or at least as informative as I did. Until next time!

Product Photography - Part 1: Natural light

Light tent setup (Natural light)

 After some digging around in my loft for film cameras last week, I stumbled upon a light tent that I got so long ago that I'd forgotten that I actually owned it (reinforcing my argument that even storage space needs to be organised, though I'm sure my husband would disagree). Anyway, as I hadn't really got any ideas for things to shoot this week, I thought I'd do a light test with the tent that I could use a reference sheet when shooting product photography in future.

The shot (above) was the basic initial setup, with one side of the tent collapsed to use the natural light from my kitchen window. The tent comes with three sides, all made of a semi-opaque fabric that works as a diffuser as well as a backdrop, though when using all three sides, there is only a black base rather than a white one. There is also a foldable sheet of double sided fabric that works as an additional backdrop/floordrop. I had a whole host of objects that I wanted to use for the test, but decided the perfume bottle would make the best subject because of it's transparent qualities.

I did take notes to match up with the light setup sketches I'd drawn up beforehand so hopefully all of the setup descriptions are accurate! There were a few rogue ones I couldn't identify though so bare with me, and also excuse my complete lack of technical language :D

1. Natural light from the kitchen window (about 3 feet away). It was an overcast day, so I suppose that technically this light was diffused, but when I mention 'diffused' light in the descriptions, I'm referring to the use of a modifier.

2. Natural window light diffused with the translucent middle of a reflector disk. (Are they even called reflector disks? Who knows...).

3. Natural window light with backdrop sheet turned to grey side and placed over right wall. The grey side reflected less of the light from the window back onto the bottle, making darker shadows and more definition on the right side of the bottle.

4. Again, the grey sheet reflected less light onto the bottle, but as I used a diffuser in this shot, there were no distinct shadows to darken.

Overall I think that the natural light worked nicely, however it created noticeable colour casts on the backdrop and didn't create any dynamic highlights or shadows on the glass of the bottle because the light source was so evenly spread, though this was improved somewhat when the bottle was laid flat.

Using natural light also meant that I had to use settings to accomodate it's dimness. This meant a wide aperture and slower shutter speed, causing a softness to the picture as I wasn't using a tripod, but also creating a smoother background due to the narrow depth of field.

If the natural light is bright enough, it works well with the light tent, even when using both diffused sides, however it does mean you're relying heavily on consistent weather conditions so that some shots don't end up brighter than others, which isn't always possible.
 

I'll be posting the second set of images taken using flash next week so the posts aren't too long and text heavy.

Photo Challenge Week 33 Artistic: Collaboration

 For 'Collaboration' I roped in my brother in law to help me out with some light painting with his light saber. Light painting is never not fun, always looks amazing and our little shoot has given me a million ideas for things I could do in the future.

Medium format film processing.

When I first began studying photography, DSLRs were more than expensive, and so I got through my college course with a borrowed Olympus 35mm and roll upon roll of black and white film. By the time I started university I'd finally got a DSLR and never really looked back, but there are so many things I miss about film photography, like the tactility and unpredictability of it, that I've always continued to collect cameras and equipment so that I could get back into analogue photography again.

Last week, ordering a new back of developer chemicals I loaded up my Yashica 635 and took a few test shots of my daughter playing. With no light meter I had to estimate the exposure settings, got into a bit of a wrestling match with the film trying to fit it on the reel as quickly as possible because my bathroom is anything but light-tight and I'd lost hope that the film would show anything at all. But then I got these! And sure, the film got a little roughed up by my frustrated hands, and about half of the frames were either fogged or blank from bad exposures, but the good ones, were really good!

Without any paper, it was pointless setting up the enlarger, and while I have a 35mm scanner it doesn't take 120 film so I had to get a bit creative to get the images digitized. I cut a square out of some paper to make a frame for the negative, securing it with hair grips so that I wouldn't mark the film and then taping a square of white paper to the other side of the glass, behind the negative for the light to shine through before photographing it on a DSLR with a 24mm lens. It certainly didn't provide the level of contrast or detail that scanning or printing via enlarger would have, but it provided better results that I'd been expecting.

I'm so glad I can finally say that I've put my medium format to some good use, and that my efforts paid off. I can't wait to take out the Bronica next time!

Widlflowers

 On Sunday afternoon we went for a walk in search of this field of wildflowers. Funnily enough we'd actually been to the spot before, a few months ago when we were looking for a place to feed ducks and this place was marked on the map as a pond. It wasn't a pond. But this is far better. Unfortunately I didn't to get to spend as long as I would have liked there, though it's certainly being added to my list of perfect places for future photoshoots.