After ages of reading David Hobby’s excellent Strobist blog (and hopefully assimilating some of the stuff he teaches), I finally decided to participate in one of his assignments with a few shots of my own. In order to do that I had to perform the correct motions of registering on Flickr, joining his Strobist group and uploading the pictures that I took.

This particular assignment was about controlling specular highlights on very shiny objects, namely cooking implements. I must be suffering from ADD because I started shooting after barely getting the gist of the assignment. I assumed cooking utensils included plates to I shot these very ornate plates that I happen to have lying around. Well, I was wrong but luckily enough I realized the mistake just before submitting the image to the Strobist group. Here’s the image. You can read more about how I shot it in the Flickr description.

The following evening I switched to the right track and this time I came up with these next 3 images.

Now I gotta tell you, if you have no idea what the “Strobist” philosophy is, you really need to spend some time on this awesome site. Photographic lighting with small strobes is simply amazing. It’s not easy. It is an art and a science but man, once you start mastering a few basic concepts, the possibilities are endless.

The size of the light source is another factor. Bigger the light source, softer the shadows. Finally, the distance from the light source to the object plays a role in the intensity of the light that falls on the object.

That’s it, in a nutshell, but this is a gross over-simplification of the whole thing. Once again, for details on how I shot these photos, read the description on the Flickr page. Even though Mr. Hobby commented favorably on two of the images, I am not exactly pleased with how they turned out. I’m particularly displeased with how long it took me to come up with the final three images. But then again, I can always blame it on my equipment (I don’t have light stands so I have to figure various ways of propping my flashes; my posterboard backgrounds seem to have a mind of their own and refuse to stand up; it always takes a long time to set everything up and then clear it back again and so on and so forth).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Canon EOS 30D, Lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.