APPROXIMATE TIME
6 hours.+ Allow enough time to re-shoot if necessary
Assignment 7
Discovering Light
The purpose of this assignment is to explore the characteristics of light. Even though you’re working with a static situation, you’ll find that a lot of the principles you apply in this assignment, will stick with you and you’ll be looking for it in the field.
Here I provide the relevant histograms as illustration of what you should expect to see either in Lightroom, or on the back of your camera when you’re making these shots.
High Key Image
Exposure: 0.5 sec at f 2.8 ISO 100
High Key Image Histogram
Low Key Image
Exposure: 1/30 sec at f2.8 ISO 200
Low Key Image Histogram
Front Lighting
Exposure: 1/30 sec at f2.8 ISO 200
This is the boring-est picture in the world. You can see that front lighting just flattens the image completely, depriving the garlic of any personality it might’ve had.
Top Lighting
Exposure: 1/30 sec at f 2.8 ISO 200
Things are starting to look more interesting.
Side Lighting
Exposure: 1/15 sec at f 2.8
See how the side light is emphasizing the bumps on the bottom right part of the garlic. If I had to change this shot, I would add a teensy little bit of fill light on the right, just to give us a little bit more of the whole head of garlic, possibly by using a reflector.
Backlighting
Exposure: 1/100 sec at f 2.8
I love how the backlight has picked out the delicate textures of the skin of the garlic. The composition is slightly awkward. I had moved the garlic around a bit and was standing away from the camera, triggering the shutter with a wireless remote, and I failed to re-frame. (Well somebody had to hold the light!)
Emphasis on texture
Exposure: 1/20 sec at f 2.8.
Actually all of the images that had directional light on it, except for front lighting, showed great textures. I picked this one, where the light is shining from the top onto the rusted nail heads. I used a focused torch to light only the area that I wanted to highlight.
Concentrated light
Exposure: 1/50 sec at f 2.8.
Diffused Light
Exposure: 1/25 sec at f 2.8.
I used exactly the same light source as the image illustrating Concentrated Light above, but I used a sheet of packing foam to diffuse the light. The shadow is now noticeably softer.
Notice the sheet of packing foam covering the light.
Light Painting
Exposure: 15.0 seconds at f 22 ISO 100
These nails really worked out beautifully. I love this technique. I waited until 8pm until it was completely dark in our kitchen before shooting this. Use a flashlight with a very focused beam and play around with different “painting durations”, running your torch over areas that you want to highlight and excluding the areas that you want to drop away. Switch off your flashlight when you’re done, so that you don’t get any ambient lighting disrupting your carefully planned still life.
Exposure: 15 seconds f22 ISO 100.
Here is another experiment with my flashlight painting across all the items, mostly from above if you pay attention to where the shadows are falling.