Once a month our camera club hold workshops at a local village hall where we practice photography techniques and discuss matters photographic. This month the objective was to practice ‘Still Life’.
The session started with me doing a short presentation of different black and white conversion techniques. What was interesting about this was although many of the audience were familiar with most of what I showed, the presentation generated a lot of discussions – it wasn’t just me talking, others were making interesting observations. But I did manage to show a couple of general photoshop techniques which most were not aware of.
We then started to practice our still life. About 5 or 6 members brought along their own setups and most brought along subjects to photograph. I spent most of the time looking at what others were doing, discussing what they were doing and helping out. I didn’t get my camera out until the last 30 minutes of so. I made use of the time to try a different lighting setup and experiment with HDR (High Dynamic Range).
I wanted to try and see the impact of using ‘bare’ flashguns. In the above photo there is an old ‘hammerhead’ flash which I was using to provide fill-in. Not shown in the photo is the other flashgun providing the main or key light.
The first image below is the basic setup using a single flashgun near the camera:
Here you can see the shadow is very hard and distinct. Switching on the fill-in flash gives:
You can see the shadows are a lot softer. While taking these I also took some bracketed images to put through the HDR software when I got home.
I was a bit disappointed with this. Although I ran the software on its default settings, the results were not good. Spending a few minutes playing with the settings didn’t improve things much. One downside is that the black background is no longer very black as you can see:
This is something I am going to need to work at.
As far as the arrangement went, I did not pay too much attention as I was trying to get the lighting correct but one thing that stood out was one of the garden tool handles at the front. We didn’t notice it at the time, but it is too large and dominant in the image.