I'm at my aunt and uncles house this weekend, and tonight I found this weird little trinket in a bowl of shells. I'm not really sure what it is, but I thought it'd be beautiful to photograph.
My first strategy was to raise up the thing and use the soft box to light it. I had on the macro filter again too. However, when I tried this, the light was very directional and unattractive. I felt like the light needed to wrap around this little more.
I tried using the ring light next, but the distance was too close and it proved ineffective. Grrr, now what?
A bare strobe was the next logical step, so I just tried that. Normally, I don't use bare strobes because they send such a hard light. However, since the distance was so small, they effectively turned into soft boxes! Compared the thing, the strobes were huge, so they actually cast fairly soft light.
I put the thing on a wood desk to try to match textures a bit, and put a strobe on either side of it. At lowest power and f/22, things were still a little bit bright, so I pulled out the wide angle diffusers built into the strobes to calm them down a bit. This worked perfectly! There's also a built in bounce card, which helped back light the thing a little bit and make it stand out against the background. Take a look.
Most of the edits were done with two adjustment masks. One mask softened and darkened the area around the thing, to pull focus into the center of the image. I heavily feathered this mask to make the transition zone fairly large. This meant that I had to really make sure it wasn't darkening the thing itself, as it's easy to with such soft masks.The other mask lightened the shadow areas a little bit, as they were a bit dark. I also converted to b/w, I'm just loving doing that lately. Finally, I brightened up the very tip of the thing just a hair. It was falling into shadow and I didn't like that.
Enjoy!
See you tomorrow!
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