#7 - 52 Weeks Lit Up

A bit of a change this week. All my strobe gear had to be packed away to make room for the visiting in-laws so I tried to keep things to a single speedlight.

Years ago, when I first discovered off-camera lighting, I'd seen a style that is great for lighting up glass items in a product type shot.

Now back then, with the limit of a tethered flash, I couldn't really push the speedlight to where I wanted to. But that's all history now.

So the premise of the shot is to create a strongly back-lit environment. By utilising backlighting with glass objects you can just about eliminate those ugly reflections that plague front-lit images. The back lighting also does a great job of highliting the curvature of the glass structure as the light is reflected at different angles across the curved surface.

This week also saw Valentine's Day come and go and in keeping with this annual excuse for florists and jewelers to make a killing I used my wife's rose bouquet (you didn't actually think I'd be silly enough to not indulge my Valentine) as the main subject matter.

The half full beer was used for setting up and to balance the overwhelmingly soppy theme...

Unfortunately for my background I had to resort to a bit of calico (I ironed it at least!) so the first thing I had to do was completely blow it out to white.

To do this I simply moved the background so that it was 1m or so behind the bottle with the bottle on a table. The speedlight was on a stand under the table point up toward the background and out of view.

You can see how the backlighting really highlights the shape of the bottle and adds depth to the image not to mention the rich colour of the delightful amber nectar!

With the lighting sorted I moved the bottle back to my end of the table (it's important to keep well hydrated on a lazy Sunday) and brought in the flowers...

With the flower buds I moved in for some more abstract types...

And the pick of the bunch, converted to monochrome with a straw tint...

The pick... ISO100, 1/200s, f/11 @ 200mm. Speedlight at 1/8 power

One thing I'd like to see next time is more of a gradient across the background. There's a hint of it in the last image, but I'd like to see it more pronounced and I think the best way to achieve this would be to snoot the speedlight. One fore next time...

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Thanks for reading!!!

Will