This is what the pen looked like without the iPhone light
How to build a two light off camera setup without any photo gear.
This summer my car was broken into and just about all of my camera gear was stolen so I haven’t really felt much like keeping this blog updated. Last night I was fiddling with one of my fountain pens and the orange celluloid of my Delta Dolce Vita seems to glow with an internal fire. I thought to myself that it would be awesome to have a lamp shade made of this material so I turned off the lights and set the cap of my pen on top of a little flashlight. It was so beautiful. I took some pictures of the cap with the one camera I had that wasn't stolen, but then I realized that with the high contrast setup the carving details on the cap band were lost. If I had had all of my gear my instinct would have been to pull out one of my flashes, put an orange gel on it to match the light coming from inside the pen and fire away. Since all of my stuff was stolen I didn’t have that option so it occurred to me to remove the blind cap from the back of the pen cover and use it to cover the light on my iPhone and use that to light up the carving on the cap band. This had the benefit of turning the light exactly the same colour as the light that was glowing out of the cap but the drawback of being very dim so I had to hold the whole thing very close. I like the way it turned out and the fact that I didn’t have all my gear meant that I had to come up with a pretty innovative solution that probably made the image better. Who knows, it certainly was fun.
-Russell Berg
www.seeingberg.com
For those of you unfamiliar with fountain pens this is the Delta Dolce Vita Oro in a more traditional lighting treatment.