14th
Photoshoot - Chips on black (with reflection)
Not healthiest thing to eat, but in “pepper & spices” flavor these are quite hard to resist. One evening I was experimenting with shooting various objects on glass, so the snack I was having at hand came to be natural part of the experiment.
As with most home shoots, I used CLS (out of laziness). Pop-up flash on my D300 body was the commander, SB-600 and SB-900 were slaves. Used 105/2.8 VR lens (my favorite), manual 1/200 sec at f11.
You may notice I like working in manual (M) mode with CLS. It’s the laziness factor again, as you can set the safe values for time and aperture, and light in the scene becomes variable - these flashes will just put in exact amount of light needed for proper exposure.
Now the idea is that the CLS master (commander) flash doesn’t affect the scene at all if you don’t want to (i.e. if you set the power to “—-”). But in reality, there’s a bit of the light leaking into the exposure window - try to shoot a mirror with CLS commander flash set to “—-”, you will still see the master flash in the photo.
To avoid this unwanted lightsource (it’s bright enough to add catchlight in subject’s eyes), I’m using Nikon SG-3IR - you can do the same with piece of exposed film, or in general any material that passes through the infra-red light (for about 10x cheaper).
I have to admit, this was big trial-error process, as I didn’t know exactly how the light will react with the 1cm thick glass desk I found in the basement. I’ve put the glass on small IKEA table placed upside down (legs up - glass being on those legs) and began the experiment.
Started with placing SB-900 right below the object, zoomed to 200mm, and fired away, to find out it’s quite what i want, except the light bouncing around, showing the table and legs in the dark - time to use some restriction. Pringles snoot was first of the light modifiers I found in the lighting bag, so why not give it a try? Another test shot revealed the snoot certainly solved the bouncing, and I had perfectly dark background now.
The crunchy treat needed some more higlight though, so I placed SB-600 on a lightstand, attached a cardboard grid to avoid any light spilling around from top, and made it light from top right above the crunchy.
Few shots later, after tweaking power ratios of both flashes (bottom one went to -1EV while top one had to gain +1EV), I had my “thing on a glass surface” photo, with dark background, reflection and everything.
