Tuesday 9 September 2008

Red, white, black and a touch of steel - # 08/213

Another attempt to amuse myself on a wet, grey day.

The red salt pot stands out nicely and livens things up. The polished black granite provides a pleasing reflection and the white ceramic sugar bowl contrasts dramatically with the black.

The tiny dots are reflections and little flecks of salt or sugar that twinkle like stars in the black vastness of Outer Space.

The stainless steel spoon shows pleasing pin-points of light and I notice a strange cascade of stardust that seems to be flowing out from the bowl of the spoon.

The light comes from a very large handheld torch. The camera is tripod-mounted and the white balance set for "tungsten".

The Olympus C7070 wz was manually spot-focused on the word "table" using close range macro, and the Aperture was set manually at f8.0 to give a longer depth of field. The ISO was manually fixed at ISO 100; the shutter was released remotely to avoid shake and fired at 1/6th of a second.

It's not a work of art, but I am pleased by the richness, clarity and depth, which are the qualities I wanted to capture.

4 comments:

  1. What? A large handheld TORCH???? Well that might be a solution to my teensy pop up flash dilemma, but I'm a little uneasy. So what did you do after the fire department left???

    Seriously, I admire your inventiveness. This is indeed a photograph full of clarity and depth. Your description ranks right up there with your lovely image.

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  2. Let it rain! You seem to handle the situation perfectly!

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  3. You have already written everything I wanted to say. A very nice photo, simple but yet effective.

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  4. Ever tried lightpainting?

    I quite like this for the reasons you give, and the technique and patience is worth a gold star (manually focused digital macro indeed!). But I think either you have a big pile of salt on the work surface or it is scrupulously clean.

    (I actually like yesterdays better)

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