Castaway
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The second season of the DPChallenge Photography Leage started this week over at DPC and I decided to submit a warm-up entry before the season begins to get back into the game – I haven’t taken part in the site’s competitions for a while. I decided to shoot something for the Out of the Ordinary challenge.
I’m staying with Alison in Bermuda at the moment. (My flight was meant to leave 4 hours ago but with the airspace around the UK being closed for some foreseeable time I’m not going anywhere soon.) We borrowed some furniture from her house and drove to Warwick Long Bay. We set the things up where I thought we’d get a wave washing over them once in a while. Turns out that for a long time the only wave that would make it that far was the one that got my feet wet when we set up…
In order to make the lamp light up I placed a Canon Speedlite 580EXII inside the lamp head. I had taken out the bulb earlier. My initial plans to keep it there with a superclamp didn’t work out because there was not enough room inside the lampshade. So I kept the flash and the Pocketwizard FlexTT5 that was attached to it in place with a ball bungee. A Full C.T.O. gel gave the flash the colour temperature of a tungsten lamp. The flash was set to ETTL, I let the camera do the metering for the lamp, which was easier since my aperture, shutter speed and ISO kept changing as it got progressively darker after sunset. The settings for this photo were f/4, ISO400, 1/30. I also asked Alison to point a snooted flash at the plant to give it a bit of extra definition.
Behind the Scenes: Shot Glasses
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I wanted to play with some water and came up with this constellation of shot glasses. The glasses actually stay like that on their own – no glue needed. To light this image, I used the back of a poster as background – probably a Star Wars poster, I have more of those than I have space on my walls. In order to avoid highlights in the wrong places on the highly reflective glasses, I directed the light from the flash at the background. The whole thing is therefore backlit. I used a DIY snoot to concentrate the light on a small area and to create a soft fall-off, so that the center of the background would be slightly brighter than the edges. I also put a double CTO on the flash. As a result, the background in the original RAW was plain orange. When I turned the background back to gray during RAW conversion, the ink in the main shotglass got a stronger blue colour as a result. The post-processing consisted mostly of getting rid of dust and scratches on the glasses.
The photo was used in the last issue of inQuire to go along with an article on drink spiking.