Hi Gang!
In my Exercising your Creative Muscle post this week I talked about keeping my work fresh and creative even though I had no real subjects/things to shoot. Once you start shooting it is as easy to keep the momentum going, as it is to let it stagnate. To avoid the later I decided to set up a shot of my Wife’s gum ball machine. It has a small silver base (great reflections) and a glass bulb to hold the gum balls.
After reading an article in PopPhoto this last month about shooting glass, I decided to shoot glass (gum ball machine) on glass (a glass topped table in my pitch black basement). I cleaned the glass, readied a few miscellaneous lights for the effect I wanted and took a few shots. I Chimped each shot and thought they looked good. They looked like I wanted, the gum ball machine was in total darkness with a hint of light falling from one side. This created great glints from the silver base and you could clearly see the red and green M&M’s ® (we didn’t have gum) inside and reflected off of parts of the base.
My Wife called me for dinner so I popped the card into the reader, launched Adobe Lightroom © and imported the photos. After we ate I returned to my computer to see a complete failure. The shots were unusable. Ok they weren’t complete failures. The lighting was good and the silver base reflected everything well but the glass bulb holding the M&M’s ® had candy dust inside. Not something I had seen or thought about when I polished the outside. The resulting glass basically gave off a dirty glow and was not crystal clear. I trashed most of the files and decided to shoot something else.
What to shoot. I had always wanted to see what could be done with 4 small iron Deer figures my Aunt Kathy had given me years ago. I already had the lights and tripod set up so I dropped the figures in place and started shooting. Five minutes of changing the lighting produced sixteen shots. I Chimped again and decided to see how they looked on my monitor.
I like the results, what do you think?
Lee
