PHTG 1048: Week 3 – Still Life in the Studio

This week we were asked to bring our camera gear (camera, lenses, tripod, camera manual), not that I haven’t been bringing my gear to each class anyway. Our topic of the week would be Properties of Light and we would be photographing still life items with a variety of constant light sources.

There would be 4 setups and the requirements for this particular class were as follows:

• Shoot on Manual settings
• Choose lowest ISO, in this case I can shoot at ISO 100
• Set Colour Temperature. This would be the White Balance and I choose to do Custom White Balance for each setup.
• Set metering to Spot Meter
• Use gray card to determine exposure prior to capturing each image
• Record the exposures for each shot

We were broken up into 4 groups of 4 and 1 group of 5. Even though I was in the group of 5, we did a pretty good job of each getting a turn at shooting. We also helped each other out quite a bit, which was nice.

I used my Canon XSi with the EF 50mm f1.8 II lens for all the photos below. Special thanks to Peter Anderson for allowing me to borrow his Manfrotto tripod!

Flat Art Copy Shot (2 shots)

We were to take 2 photos of a picture/poster on a wall that was lighted with 2 hard lights placed at 45 degree angles. It took a few shots to get the proper white balance but the following is one of my captures:

I should have probably gone in a bit closer to eliminate more of the black background, but I don’t think the exposure is too off. Yes, the photo of New York and the Taxis are blurry, but I think the copy is fairly good. maniqune

Lighting Ratios

This one was the trickiest for majority of the students. What we needed to do is meter both the highlight and shadow side of a mannequin head that was light with a single hard light. The idea behind this was to see the ratio of lighting, such as a 1:2 or 1:32. The lights were set up for a 1:2 and a 1:32 ratio with the use of a bounce board.

This is the composite of my 2 photos. It shows (hopefully) the ratio between the two areas.

*no models were harmed in the capturing of these photos.

Glassware

This was a neat setup. There were a variety of glass bottles set up with a variety of lighting schemes: Direct, Bounced and Back lit.

Direct Light

Don’t mind the background or paper the items are sitting on. We were to observe any specular highlights without under or overexposing the scene. Here you can see that the light is off camera right.

Bounced Light

There was a white board held above the glassware. With a light off to camera left that would bounce the light down on top of the glass.

Backlit

I think I like the look of the glassware with the backlight out of all the other lighting schemes we had.

Soft Light/Hard Light

So the point behind this exercise is to see how hard light can be diffused to create softer shadows. I don’t think it diffused it enough but the shadows did feather a bit once the diffuser panel was in front of the light source.

After thoughts

It was a fun day in class. Getting to chat with fellow students and getting to take photos made this quite enjoyable. Can’t wait till week 5 where we get into Natural Light Portraiture.

I might also just stick to using my 50mm f1.8 lens. I do have to manually zoom (shuffle my feet around) but I think it will help force me to compose my shot better as we’re not allowed to do any post-process work.