Exercise: Shiny Surfaces

The exercise on p163 is about taking photos of reflective surfaces. The instructions were a bit weird, take a shiny object to lay flat and photograph & light from from above. Then take a cone of tracing paper to put over the lens and the object (but not in the photo) to stop the shiny object from reflecting everything about. Right, so I duely got about a spoon and gave it ago. However I couldn’t get the tracing paper cone big enough or stiff enough to stay in place over the spoon out of shot. Finally after getting very irritated with such a silly request I managed to (sort of) do it with a five pence piece. The first photo is the 5p just lit with a bare desk lamp. The second 5p is lit with the silly cone of shame over (see the little set up shot).

What we’re actually seeing here is that in the first shot the light is not in the family of angles that would be a direct reflection on the 5p. Chapter 6 of the Light, Science and Magic book (see my bookshelf) explains this very well. In the ‘under the cone’ shot the 5p is reflecting its surroundings (the cone). This is actually better demonstrated in my next set of images, which dont use a cone but a light tent (better, more stable version of the cone).

 
 
 
 

 
  
 

The first image is just the two bare lights. You can see it reflects its surroundings completely.

I thought to soften the light with diffusers but you can see the brown cardboard in the left hand cup and my arm reaching out to hold the second diffuser in both the larger cups.

This was the same set up as before but I moved the diffusers closer to the cups, you see its removed the brown colours in the left hand cup because the centre of the diffuser is now firmly in the family of angles which the cup directly reflects. But you can still see me and the rest of the surround reflected.

To fix that you need the whole object surrounded (like with the cone) so we can use a light tent. You can still see me and the camera in the opening from the tent though.

 

The light tent comes with a little front piece with a slit in it for just such an occasion which attaches with velcro. This allows you to just poke the camera lens through the opening to minimise as much of the direct reflections as possible. Obviously we cannot not have the lens there, if we don’t point the camera at the object we don’t get a photo, but we’ve done what we can. I guess if you wanted too, at this point you could just clone that out in photoshop to tidy it up a bit.

The reason I took this last photo, is I thought that the left hand cup was a bit bright, so I re-angled the lamp outside of the tent a bit more to my liking.

In truth I prefer the wider angle of the first few photos, and the light tent with the front open, if you were to just make the opening black to remove the reflection of camera & me then it would look better I think than the weird frontage that the front flap reflection gives.

 

Part one exercise recap

So looking back what have we learned in part one: the frame?

We looked at the different effects of zooming & shooting at different focal lengths. We played with depth of field (DOF) and it’s effect of emphasising a subject put from the background.
We covered a couple of ways to show a sense of movement. We explored what sorts of subjects work well in vertical or horizontal format. We touched on compositional guidelines and learnt some cool features of the cropping tool in LR.

We looked at position of subject in the frame and balance in photographs. How you can affect the tension in the image by playing with that balance. We looked at how your choice of horizon position within the frame would affect the image.

We analysed how your approach to a subject can yield photographs you weren’t expecting when you first started your approach, essentially an exercise on ‘seeing’.

Basically we demonstrated that there are a heck of a lot of choices that we make before pressing the shutter that deeply impact the resulting photograph, it’s not just about what we shoot it’s how we shoot it.

And, I started reading a bunch of really interesting books. I’ll post more on those as I finish them though.

Looking back over the new photographs I generated for and from the exercises, these are my top 5 photos so far.

Next up is the end of chapter assignment (for those that remember Nintendo platform games this would be the big boss at the end of the level). This assignment we have to print out, present and send to our tutors for official marking. I already know what I’m going to do for it but I’ll present it to you over the next few posts.