Light Play

I couldn't resist taking some time in the afternoon day to set up my Creative Room of Wonders stuff and try some things out.

Morris had to help of course.
I thought I'd take a shot of what I was doing and the simple things that I set up in the spare bedroom to play with the camera and some lights.

So at first I used the method of trying to get a nearly black backround with just the settings in the camera.
It wasn't hard.

I referenced this article by Glyn Dewis: The Invisible Black Blackdrop Photography Technique.

I didn't totally want the backdrop to be black because I don't have the flash equipment. I thought I'd experiment with his idea and see what I could do.

I moved the exposure so that the photo was nearly black. Then I put my camera on a 2 second delay and used an LED flash light to try and light up the flowers from different angles.

There is my hand right there holding up the flash light.

I took several shots and then put them through my old CS2 photomerge.
This is an archiac way of doing things similar to photo stacking and using 'light painting' at the same time. I was able to mask out my hand and then crop the photo.

I ended up with the following.

Well that was nothing to actually write home about. But, I did get an interesting combined shot. It was worth exploring some more.

I did the same thing with some toys.

This was actually quite fun. The hard part is getting a strong enough flashlight and lighting up the right areas. The above shot is probably 4 or 5 shots combined.

Then I thought, why not use a lamp?

Well I did have fun and I was able to edit out the lamp with masking tools.
However I didn't really think I ended up with anything brilliant here either.

So I took this photo into ON1 10.5 for some fun.
Much better...

I then went back to the other flower photo and decided if I could do anything more impressive.
Not sure if this fits that bill or not.
I would need to totally redo this shot as I missed lighting up the top flower and I think no amount of fiddling or editing will fix that.
But I did learn something important about light painting. Don't move the camera until you have reviewed all of the shots.

However, I did go into back to just concentrating on a nice shot of the blue and white cup.
But of course I came up with 3 versions.

When I get some free time, it looks like it is back to the drawing board for me!