Back to the Grind

S'now much fun, originally uploaded by ted.sali.

I have not been posting much as late, because now the holidays are over, and we're all getting back to more mundane things.
Today, for example, was not super-arctic cold, so first order of business was getting those poor kids of mine out of the house for a few hours and playing in the snow.
I remember as a kid just loving to play in snow, but when it's -25-30 outside, it's just not safe for little kids. Sure, they don't seem to feel the cold, and that's the real problem, they don't know when it's time to come in, nor if they're having any ill effects like frozen noses.
Anyway, I was out goofing off with the kids, so I didn't have time to do anything significant.
Now I gotta go and dry out my boots and gloves.

Celebrate the new year by bouncing photons.

I gotta be creative..., originally uploaded by ted.sali.

I'm doing lots of small image shots these days, getting tons of practice and exploring new theme ideas and textures.

Now, let me just clarify, by textures, I actually mean physical textures, not the photoshop kind...not that I have anything against the photoshop textures.

When working with small objects, you want to try to keep the object as the center of attention, this is pretty easy to do if you're just shooting it against a light or dark field. The problem is, those get boring, fast.

Eventually, you find that you need to spice up things around your subject, while keeping it the star performer. This means adding props.

For this particular set up I wandered to the nearest dollar stores and picked up a few goodies, a sack of dark river stones (yes, I bought rocks - they are hard to find in Manitoba in January), a small wooden box with a nice design, and lastly, for the padding in the box, a 4 pack of cloth floral dinner napkins.

Okay, so that's the easy part, now to light each of these surfaces without overloading the subject, and without driving myself insane with a zillion different lights and shadows. The solution: bounce your photons!

I used only one light for this, a single hot shoe flash through an umbrella positioned over the subject and slightly off to the right. this umbrella was about a foot above the subject, giving a huge relative source. Because it was so close, and the area was confined, I was able to pull this shot off with only 1/4 power, and still shot the images at ISO 400 and f9.0. Remember, light falls of at an inverse square of the distance, so if I would have moved the light back another foot, it would have only given me 1/4 as much light on my subject (not to mention reducing the relative size by about 1/3)

To fill the shadows on the left, I simply placed a white foamcore card on that side and it filled in the details nicely without creating hot spots. That's bounce number one.

Once I started shooting, though, I found that the stones seemed to lack dimension, and since I was shooting from a high angle looking down, I simply taped a second bounce card directly under the camera, where it filled just enough to give a nice wrap around the front of the stones. Bounce number two.

Behind the whole setup was a blank white wall, which added just a smidgen of edge to the back of everything, rounding out the project with Bounce number three.

The whole shot was simply staged on a small posing table topped with some black foamcore, that took care of any spaces between the rocks.

So, there you have it, one light, three bounce surfaces, and an absorption surface. The result is a nice, luxurious photo with an interesting feel that does not subtract from the subject.