Metal and Glass

After my long blog hiatus, lets try this again.

Metal and Glass is defiantly a different beast to photograph, mainly because basically are taking a picture of either a reflection or something that is invisible so some studio tricks must be implored to bring the form and image to life. The biggest thing going into this assignment was the idea, and really being able to map something out before I attempted it. The images in class did give me plenty of good ideas, such as a field knife through a Kansas license plate, or a bullet shell casing with “Your Name” in graved on it. However setting those up would require a lot more time and money then I had to deal with. Plus, it wasn’t until after I said I would take Metal and let Andrea shoot glass that I thought a pint of “Guinness” with white line lighting, and a green gel used on the head of the “beer” would make a great shoot for St. Patty’s.
However, I digress from what I did shoot. I like the idea of showing the detail of a golf club, and it’s features such as the grooves in the club face, and thanks to Andrea the previous ball markings which I thought I should clean off but she convinced me it gave the club character. I was also inspired from a few examples in class that used motion/ animation to give the picture movement. Hence, I used this shot of the balls bouncing in the picture (special thanks to Will who was early for his shoot but gave me a extra pair of hands). It did take several takes for the time we had available, but I love that I could get the balls at this moment to give me a nice “V” shape and add to the use of triangles. The white line on the club, shaft was really controlled by the soft box in front of it, I tried moving the angle of the box a couple of times, yet in the end I like that it isn’t uniform because it adds more roundness of the shaft in the photo. I really didn’t want to use a lot of wattage in the lights because the reflection would be much more difficult to control, so I’m quite happy that I back it down to 800 watts on the soft box, and got rid of the snoot that was supposed to highlight the ball on the table. One other thing looking back I’d like to have done is slow the shutter speed a bit from 250 so I could get a little more blur and action of the bouncing balls. Yet one of the problems that we had to work around was dead battery in the light meter, so I metered and bracketed off my camera. Another special thanks to the MU photo dept for having the artificial green turf on hand, that made the shoot a lot better than green poster board would have.
Andrea, was such a big help to me, and I hope I was as equally helpful to her and her ideas towards a reversal of nature and bee’s and honey. The concept is very creative, plus getting the white boxes from behind and under the table to line up to avoid as much of a gray horizon as possible was very tricky. Yet after a some trial and error I think she was very successful.