Exercise 4.3 Egg or Stone

Use a combination of quality, contrast, direction and colour to light an object in order to
reveal its form.

If I learnt one thing from this exercise it’s – plan.

Not necessarily a big plan but at least the back of a fag packet’s worth.

By this stage of part 4 I had already shot a lot of practise images and so found myself shooting different setups quickly – moving between flashes, snoots, diffusers, positions etc without really making much of any notes or thoughts about what I was doing. This is pretty typical of me I’m afraid – shoot first ask questions later. It can be ok and even preferable sometimes but for this fairly simple task it is not the way to go.

When I eventually realised what I was or rather wasn’t doing I stopped and became a little more methodical – not completely but enough that I at least made a quick note in between set ups and enough to make sure that I had 5 setups that were demonstrably different either in terms of position of light or modifiers to the light itself.

Here are the five setup’s I chose – they incorporate images using softbox, snoot, bare flash with one light and two light set ups – as indicated by my Leonardo Da Vinci diagrams.

Reflection

I kept seeing egg in students examples of this exercise so was determined to use stone – I found a few in a farmers field on a walk and practiced with these and I found the results were beautiful (at least to me) – too good for me to use in this exercise anyway (see assignment 4). I then found this almost perfectly round stone on another walk so it became the subject of this exercise. I think looking at them now I have rushed it a bit. I think I could of perhaps used this exercise more wisely to help me with planning lighting setups for other work rather than the tickbox exercise it became. In fact in doing so I have missed the chance to practise with colour (I do have some warming and cooling flash ‘gels’ and did try them briefly but didn’t like the look – perhaps I should have stuck with it and moved from cool to warm as the shots progressed). The other issue with using artificial light is where to draw the line – I kept wanting to buy more flash units and bigger soft boxes and other things never considered before like boom stands! In the end I stuck with the kit I have.

I think at some stage I need to go back and do this exercise concentrating on flash ratio’s between main and fill lights and also with a proper background to show the difference in light fall off – this would have been a more useful way to fulfil this exercise.

Contacts

I’ve found that including contacts as JPG’s are almost worthless due to the size so instead have included them as a downloadable PDF.