My experiments

S

Starmapper

Well-known member
Don't know if you guys want to see this kind of stuff or not but I'm bound to throw it up once in a while so I'll keep it in a folder rather than scatter it throughout the thread. I'm trying to improve my abilities as a photographer by seeing what happens if I add a light here or there at this power or that. So yes, this is all experimental results of my testing and playing. Please feel free to slice it up or butter it as need be:)


blues2.jpg


Cardboard snoot fired at back wall with low powered fill light from the front. Blue gel on both.
 
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I like it - I think its well shot and has some depth, which your vodka shot was missing. It's well done but my only critique would be your placement of objects. It almost seems like the two glasses are TOO close together. Kind of like with your vodka photo - the glass was really close to the bottle.

Try to space things out a little, they don't have to be that close - otherwise I really like it.

Kegan
 
Good point Kegan, thanks. My entire focus here was on the lighting but you're right, one must pay attention to the other details such as layout.

PS...Thanks for the critique, it's really helpful for me to have others catch what I totally miss and adds greatly to my understanding of what I'm trying to achieve :thumbup:
 
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Wow I love the colors there! With the three objects right there, I'd be tempted to line them up precisely in a row for a little uniformity. I like "natural" looking stuff but sometimes nice rigid lines really work for me.
 
At the risk of repeating myself, I'll re post this one as part of my experimental collection:) It was my first effort at a still life and one I was fairly happy with...Well, not so much the subject matter but more the lighting.


still1sm.jpg
 
Thanks Jeff...I remember someone somewhere ribbing me about cheating by using frosted glass, so I went for real glass and realized straight up that it was not going to be as easy as I had thought. The vodka shot was a direct result of that track. I am determined to master shooting glass as it really gets into lighting control as opposed to just randomly blasting a subject with light.
 
When I was buying these onions at the veg store the woman was man handling them and there's me saying "Careful...Careful!" She looked at me all pissed and said "They're just onions sir!" I reply "NO!....These will be famous onions!!" Yeh, got a few strange looks:)


amigos.jpg



amigos2.jpg



I think I like the second one better. Don't have a softbox yet so on number two I used sheets of printer paper fastned a couple of inches in front of the flash heads.
 
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Ha I bet you did get some looks! I like em. Just nice shapes and it makes laugh because they are just onions but they look really nice.

The best help I can give on shooting glass is to light for the reflections and specular highlights in the glass and not the glass itself necessarily. Does that make sense?
 
The more I turn it over in my head, what you said makes perfect sense. It seems to me it's all about controlling what the glass throws at you in terms of light. I'd have to shoot at night because I have little control over ambient around here in the daytime.
 
for controlled smoke pictures you can use PS. Make black background, draw some white lines on it and use the smear and distort tools to turn that to swirling smoke. Layer that with another picture layer which needs smoke wafts on it...
 
Starmapper said:
At the risk of repeating myself, I'll re post this one as part of my experimental collection:) It was my first effort at a still life and one I was fairly happy with...Well, not so much the subject matter but more the lighting.


still1sm.jpg
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I'm really diggin this one Mino. When you look at this and the first one in the thread, I understand what Kegan meant about placement. This one looks really nice, and I especially like the space on either side. It really emphasizes the objects as one unit, without having to cramp them together.

With the Blue one, there is so much uniformity in color, everything has a commonality to it. So spacing them a bit further apart wouldn't detract from it. Uniformity of course works for me, and I didn't mean to sound critical of it if I did.

I think your use of gels and in camera processes is wonderful, even as much as I love to dig around in post. It really shows skill to do that and get what you want out of it. People (myself included damnit) rely too much on post to fix things, and I really think that shows sometimes.

And the onions make me hungry. I'm one of those people that eat 'em like apples. Yum!





Petrus said:
for controlled smoke pictures you can use PS. Make black background, draw some white lines on it and use the smear and distort tools to turn that to swirling smoke. Layer that with another picture layer which needs smoke wafts on it...
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That defeats the point of what he is after. Photoshop is good, but achieving photorealistic and truly authentic looking smoke like that is usually not practical. I've yet to see it done and look real, and I've looked everywhere.
 
Thanks Matt. Yes it's not my style to use PS to make smoke though I'm sure Petrus didn't mean I was wasting my time in the dark shooting it when I could just PS it:) I'm the kind of guy who doesn't even get the idea of a Bokeh filter, it's sort of like paint by numbers work hanging in the foyer to me. Placement of objects is huge and in the Blue shot I literally was totally absorbed by the light and focus, only loosely checked the placement. Sometimes I get too focused on specifics and forget stuff. As an aside, I remember years ago in a pub, I bet my buddy ten bucks I could throw an empty beer glass up in the air, have it flip three times then land on its base on the table to. When it smashed all over the table I was dumbfounded...I hadn't even considered the possibility as I was so foucused on the spin and flip :):crybaby:
 
I was not going to dismiss your smoke picture efforts, just throwing in another angle to look at these things which is usefull sometimes when you need exactly certain kind of smoke to add to you pictures. I have done it once when I needed a smashed radio with smoke escaping.
 
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