Since I got it, I've wanted to do a photo with it. I've had it for a couple of weeks, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. Until today.
My initial attempt at lighting it failed miserably. I thought that I could light up two pieces of white computer paper on either side of the watch and that would act like a mini photo studio. Wrong. Just made ugly light and lit everything very very evenly and boring. Like just shooting the available light from a ceiling fixture. Not that great.
Then I remembered how I shot my 35mm camera last week. With the gridded 560 on one side and the soft box on the other. I set that up again, and it worked like a charm. I had to do a little tweaking, but it's pretty similar. Here's a pic for ya...
As you may see, there are some differences that the set up for the camera. The soft box is a lot closer, for one. I wanted it to be this close in order for it to really wrap light around the watch. Being so big compared to the watch, the light would come from a wide variety of angles, so it would completely light the face and fill in some of the ugly shadows left by the other light. Speaking of the other light, I had this one set down instead of acting like a spot light. Mainly this is to get come highlighting on the side of the watch instead of using it as a spot light.
If you look at the side of the watches, there's some really cool specular highlights in the plastic. None in the glass because the angle of incidence and reflection did not intercept with the camera.
Camera setting for this were, f5, ISO100, and 1/80. The aperture was at f5 for two reasons why you'd stop down: depth of field, and to make it darker. With the flashes this close, even at minimum power they are just too much.
In Lr, I raised the clarity, and then to compensate for that I bumped the shadows and blacks a bit. I also raised the saturation overall, and raised it a lot in the watch face itself to bring out some of that glow in the dark green. To finish it off, I added a bit of a vignette to draw focus to the watch.
I find it very interesting thinking about the concept of capturing this specific moment in time. You can see exactly when I took this photo. The date and time down to the second. Looking back on this at the end of the year will be down memory lane for sure. It's the same for every photo really, capturing that single moment in time. It will never exist again by every law of physics, yet you can hold it in your hands or on a screen and recall it again and again. Is that actually recreating the past in the same way as a memory does, or is it completely different? And since the shutter speed is not actually instantaneous, are you capturing a single moment, or and infinite number of moments? One of my professors lectured that photography, and film as well, can not actually capture motion or time. They capture single moments and nothing else. I beg to differ. Like I said, the shutter speed dictates how long light is let to the sensor, therefor it dictates how much time is recorded. You are not capturing a single moment, but a length of time. This is very obvious when you have too slow a shutter speed to capture moving subjects. You can see where they have been, and where they went. You can see the motion. However, we then have to ask, what is motion? Is it physical moment, or the path an object takes in space? Depending on how we define motion affects whether or not cameras capture movement. And not even how we define the word "motion," it's how we define the concept of motion. Through verbal trickery one could prove one or both theories false, but one can not twist the very essence and concept of part of the physical nature of the universe to their will.
End random rant...
See you tomorrow.
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