Glass of Light

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

www.seeingberg.com

When Light Curves

Playing with light on a beautiful white vase. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 at 30mm f/8 1/250 ISO 100

The curve and line of the thing pulls my hand to it.  Every time I see it I want to touch it.  I is light and cool with a milky form that invites inspection and exploration.  Even all on it's own, just sitting there on the table it seems to absorb the light in the way that a white thing should not.  It is a beautifully made thing.

One afternoon during Christmas vacation I decided to pull out my lights and photography this vase.  My wife buys vases, alot of vases but this one in particular I really like.  The shape and texture of the thing where made to have light playing against it.  I set up on a tripod in front of the kitchen table and draped some black fabric over a chair that I had put on top of the table.  This was my very "high tech" studio.  I started by setting an exposure that would completely kill the ambient light, (my first frames where completely black), then I started layering in light.  For this image I used 2 flashes that where mounted off camera and triggered by Cactus V4 strobes, (very inexpensive and very reliable with fresh batteries).  The camera left flash was set at 1/32 power and mounted on a light stand and had a small, 6"x4", light box velcroed to it.  I wanted the light to be softer coming from the left but I didn't want the full wrap around that an umbrella would provide.  I really wanted the camera right side of the vase to be brightly lit and yet to maintain an area of shadow to emphasize the three- dimensionality and shape of the vase.  I put a homemade cardboard snoot ala David Hobby on my second flash and held it at extreme camera right with very low power, 1/64 or 1/128.  It turned out that I needed a pretty extreme angle to get the effect I was looking for.  The snooted flash is behind the vase pointing back at the camera at a slight angle so that the flash head is visible in the uncropped frame.  I knew I wanted a square composition so the flash was going to get cropped out anyway.  It was very cool to be able to paint the light the way I wanted it to look.

-Russell Berg

Below is another shot that I took without the snooted flash at camera right.  I like this one too especially the way that the left edge of the vase is well defined and the right edge falls away into shadow.