Looking at the Past

This is my 35mm camera I picked up last semester in preparation for all the analog shooting I'd be doing for class. I got a good deal on it and it has all bells and whistles. It's a perfect camera except for one thing....it doesn't work in the cold. So that basically renders it useless in Montana where the average temperature at the end of November was around -10.

It's been sitting on my floor all winter as I am now using my dad's old Nikon EM, which is fabulous by the way.

It's really a beautiful camera though. The lines, the material, even the lens just looks amazing. So why take of photo of it!

My first approach to this was to use a single light, gridded, shining down on the camera from above. For some reason I just love grids right now, something about that spotlight effect.

Anywho, just the grid didn't work out so well. I only illuminated on side of the camera, and everything fell into really ugly shadow. It looked like something taken with an on camera flash. Bleh.

So I added in some fill light with a soft box off to the right. This light illuminated the right side of the camera and then filled in the dense shadows on the left. With a little more tweaking I came up with this.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out.  This is the untouched, in camera photo that I took. There's zero adjustments or tweaking to this. 100% what you would see in real life if the strobes were consistent lights.

You can see where the gridded strobe (a 560 at 1/64) is the key light and where the 560 (at 1/128) in the soft box takes over that role. It's actually right over the lens that the two lights switch roles.

So why use a soft box as the other light source and not just a bare light or an umbrella? Well, using a bare light would be the same problem as using the grid. It's a hard light source and it would just look like crap. The nice specular highlight on the camera is coming from the big lit area of the soft box. There's wouldn't be any of that with a bare light. Or with a umbrella. Well technically that's a lie, there would be specular highlights for both, but they would be of different quality. The bare light would be small and punch, while the umbrellas would be HUGE, maybe so huge you wouldn't be able to see the difference between the highlight and transition area. The soft box strikes a nice balance between the two, it has a strong highlight, but not too strong.

Another reason not to use an umbrella is that it would ruin that spotlight effect created by the grid. So it'd defeat the purpose of using a grid in the first place.

On to Lr adjustments now. As you can see, the photo looks pretty good as it is. But it's still lacking that punch. It's a bit flat, and colorless. It's very soft and dull really.

The first adjustment I added was to brighten the shadow, and darken the blacks. This effectively go more detail into the shadows while still maintaining the richness of the blacks. I also upped the clarity, which made the highlights and black more intense and richer. It adds that pop.

On to color. First things first, raise the vibrance. Those colors in the lens are really cool and I wanted to highlight them.

Then to split toning. I toned the shadows a warm, orange color, and tinted the highlights blue. These are two complimentary (I think?) colors, so they naturally look good together. Good may be the wrong word, their conflict inflicts interest subconsciously and conscious in the viewer. It's another way to make the photo pop out.

Finally, I added a little vignette.

Camera setting were: 1/60, f5(for depth of field), and ISO100. I've already mentioned the strobes power levels but they were 1/64 for the gridded and 1/128 for the soft box.

There you have it. See you tomorrow.