I just arrived back in Bozeman today. I've spent all day driving and flying, so I'm pretty tired and hungry. But this photo caught my eye so I had to give it a shot.
I've been wanting to do this exact photo for years. Literally years. Ever since I was a little kid I loved staring at the reflections in bobbles hanging on christmas trees. Who hasn't? I always tried to get a picture of the reflection but it just never really turned out quite right.
This time I had some new magical powers techniques that I thought would do the trick.
Backing up a bit, I've been reading about specular highlights lately. Basically, specular highlights are the reflections of the light source(s) you are using to illuminate the subject. David Hobby explains it much more in detail on his blog, Strobist.
A silver bobble is pretty much just a mirror. So instead of trying to light the bobble and every thing around it, why not light what the bobble is reflecting and use that light in turn to light the bobble. Seems pretty obvious when you think about it, right?
The first problem I ran into was light from my soft box spilling over and causing nuclear highlights in the bobble.
So to counter act this, I pointed the soft box way away from the bobble and got this as a result.
Kinda meh, right? Nothing is illuminated except my tiny figure. Sorta cool but I'd have to crop it a ton for it too be very interesting and it wasn't the picture I was after.
So to compromise I went to the half way point with the soft box. There's still quite the highlight in the bobble, but it isn't quite as bad as the first. And the area around the bobble is illuminated too.
I added in a little something else besides the soft box. Just the soft box did a great job of illuminating me and making an awesome specular highlight, but it didn't do anything for what was behind me, and barely lit the branches behind the bobble.
In order to 1.) Give more depth to me and the room behind me and 2.) brighten everything a bit, I dragged the shutter.
By this I mean I used a slow (1/30th) shutter speed. This let in more ambient light (i.e. not from the soft box) and so the room behind me and the tree got brighter. It also created a lot of blur because of camera shake. You can see this in the light trails behind me. But you can't in the branches because relative to the camera, they did not move much. Plus they were already soft from the shallow depth of field so camera shake wouldn't be as noticeable.
This technique of a slow shutter to brighten what's not illuminated by the strobe (whats making the light in the soft box) has been a favorite of mine lately. Strobes are not effected by shutter speeds longer than the sync speed for the flash. The flash fires a burt of light that is consistent. So it doesn't matter if you're at the sync speed (the same length of time as the burst of light from the flash) or at 30 seconds of exposer. The strobe is only going to fire a short burst. Therefor, the subject is only illuminated for a very short time. This is the same principle of using a fast shutter speed. The subject doesn't have time to move around and blur. It's only being lit for short period of time in either case.
So by that logic, I can use any shutter speed I wanted and not have to worry that I would get blurred in this photo as I was being lit by only the soft box. The background would get some blur, but it would get brighter and I like the blurring effects.
Hopefully that all makes sense....
Anywho, my camera settings are as follows: 1/30th, f5.6, ISO 160. Canon 7D with 18-135 zoomed to 135mm. I used my trusty Yongnuo 560ex III strobe with a LumiQuest Soft Box III attached. The soft box makes the light source bigger and softens shadows while making nice, diffused highlights as well. Its the same principal as being able to see your shadow on a sunny day vs not being able to on a cloudy day. The clouds are one giant soft box for the sun.
I edited this in Light Room as usual. I raised the clarity (just love the look of it) brightened the highlights a bit and the shadows, just to bring out more of the branches. I upped the vibrance and saturation as well. Plus cropped to a 8x10 to get rid of some empty space at the bottom. Everything in the frame must serve some purpose, even if that purpose is the have no purpose. The empty space had no purpose even to have no purpose so it had to go away.
Again, hope that made sense...
Well, I'm hungry so I'm off to find some crackers. See you tomorrow.
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