Christmas Theme

Week 26

It is really cold right now in Calgary, around -25 degrees C and although I have gotten out to photograph a bit it is a lot more pleasant inside. When it gets cold, rainy, or miserably hot then one way to exercise your photographic eye is indoors, in the house, and that is what I chose to do this week. And since it is getting close to Christmas, I had an array of seasonal things to chose from.

Now the thing about photographing reflective round things is that they are prone to hot spots and of course they reflect things you may not want in the picture. One solution is even lighting all around, another is to carefully place things to minimize reflection or at least have it where you want it. I chose even lighting.

I put down a sheet of white card to act as a seamless background and then moved my softbox right on top of it and surrounded it with styrofoam. My softbox is a medium sized Photoflex LiteDome and I used a Nikon SB-600 flash. The SB-600 can drive a medium softbox if the subject is moderately close. I stuck one more SB-600 inside this contraption and bounced it off the front styrofoam. The SB-800 on my camera was used solely as a master for the two SB-600s. Both SB-600s were in i-TTL mode with no further adjustment to flash.

The camera is a D3 set as follows ISO 200, aperture priority f/16, and shutter speed 1/30 second (why wasn't it at 1/200? because I forgot). I was at f/16 to increase the depth of field. I probably should have put it in manual mode to get more even exposure. Exposure compensation was set at +1 stop on camera to lighten up the background a bit. Then lens is a Nikon AF-S Micro Nikkor 105mm1:2.8G ED so I can get close.

Post processing was minimal. I cropped all of the photos square to the same size and moved them on to a background layer. Once on the background, I arranged them to taste, and using curves adjusted backgrounds until they were all about the same. Then I flattened and removed sensor spots on the background (I need to clean that sensor). The background looked too dark, so I lightened the exposure overall with an exposure adjustment layer until it was a bit brighter and that was it.

Idea based on Household Chores, pages 46-47 in the book 50 Photo Projects by Lee Frost.