Assignment 2: In the Can in Five, Pictures
Took me long enough to get to this, so here it goes.
Simple shot really. I was asked to take some photos of a couple of fresh roses. I decided that since this was going to be a single light shot, I’d go for a black background reminiscent of many macro shots, but obviously this isn’t a macro shot. If I had a second light I would probably have thrown some light on the background to add some interest and depth.
First the diagram:
As you can see from the setup, this wasn’t all that complicated of a shoot, only a single shoe mount flash was used. I set some black foam core against the wall in the background so I didn’t have all the clutter that’s really there. And I used a large (30″x60″) sheet of white foam core to act as a reflector filling in the shadow side of the rose.
Canon Rebel XTi, ISO-400, 1/250th @ f/11
This was the first shot, I hadn’t thought about my umbrella, in fact my first though was to use my tracing paper scrim clamped to a tripod. I think I had the flash at 1/64th power for this, and yes, I pretty much nailed the exposure on the first shot. You really do get good at this the more you practice.
Canon Rebel XTi, ISO-400, 1/250th @ f/11
Realizing that the hard light just didn’t do it with the subject I switched to my trusty compact umbrella. Here I had widened the zoom on the flash from 105mm in the first shot to 24mm to fill the umbrella evenly. I knew I’d loose some light with the wider zoom and the umbrella so I pushed the flash up two stops to 1/16 figuring that would be sufficient. Alas I was wrong there.
Canon Rebel XTi, ISO-400, 1/250th @ f/11
Dialing in, realizing that the last shot was way under, I intuitively bumped the flash power upto 1/2. No really, I didn’t even think about what I was doing at the time, I was very much on auto pilot. That pretty much nailed the exposure.
From this point forward I played with some different compositions but I already had the necessary shot in the bag, and that was sufficient for this project.