Lately it has been so rainy and grey that I have been frustrated with wanting to go outside and make photographs and being faced with the same wet, grey light. So I decided this morning to create my own light and do a still life. I hung a string of Christmas lights at the end of my hallway and place a vase filled with more Christmas lights sitting on a stool quite near the camera. I used a 50mm lens and opened it up to f2.8 to turn the christmas lights into soft bubbles of light. I was having trouble balancing the light in the vase with the glow of the hanging Christmas lights. The Christmas lights were illuminating the hallway too much so I added a flash at very low power, (1/64). I put a snoot on the flash to reduce light spill and dropped the shutter speed to as low as I could go to get and still retain the glow out of the lights in the vase. It was a bit of a tough balancing act to deal with the three light sources, keep the hallway as dark as possible, and keep the vase lit but still glowing. If I turned up the flash too much, it washed out the glow of the lights inside the vase. If I increased the shutter speed to kill the ambient light in the hall, then I lost the glow in the vase. I got as close as I could then I darkened the hallway in Nik Viveza. It turned out pretty good but the low level of light in the vase makes it look as though the edge of the vase has curves in it.

-Russell Berg