Pictures of Something Besides Shoes

Since I’ve been playing with my new strobes, I’ve taken a lot of pictures of shoes. Well, let it not be said that Jerry Seeger is a one-dimensional, shoe-only kind of photographer. I’ve now also photographed an actual human being (albeit a fictitious one), and, most recently, I’ve expanded my inanimate object repertoire to include beer bottles.

Lacking the energy to write an episode for you all, I’ve decided to share a couple of experiments I did splashing colored light off a white backdrop, and using the shutter speed to control how much color got mixed in. One of the biggest challenges was keeping the light from the strobes from hitting the backdrop.

guinness on green

Beer Bottle on Green Background.

Beer bottle on green background. On this shot you could really see the wrinkles in the white backdrop, so I smoothed them out in iPhoto. Some odd things happened in the process, strange smudges that appear and disappear again, making me wonder once more what the %^*$ iPhoto is really doing. But I keep using iPhoto for quick-and-dirty stuff (which is just about everything). Why? Because it’s easy and has better workflow than any other program. Better for me, anyway.

Beer Bottle on Red

Beer Bottle on Red Background

Beer bottle on red background. This one I shot with my fish-eye lens, which let me get right up in the bottle’s face, putting the backdrop out of focus. In both cases I was keeping the aperture about as far open as it would go. No need for touching up. Getting a rich red color and still lighting the bottle well proved to be tough – extra light on the bottle washed out the background. In the end I had stray equipment covers, a laptop case, and a sofa pillow all blocking bits of offensive light. The pillow was blocking lens flare from the strobe behind the bottle on the right, the laptop cover blocked the right strobe from spilling onto the background, while another black nylon case blocked (most of) the spill from the front-left light onto the backdrop. I need a snoot!

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New Toys!

Recently I did a shoot with Harlean (who is a fiction), and ended up cranking the ISO setting on my camera up to 1600 just to get shutter speeds in a reasonable range. That left her with some pretty tough cleanup in post production, and meant the pictures were not what they could have been. “That does it!” said I, “We’re gettin’ us some lights!”

After some research I chose Alien Bees for my new strobes. In (sometimes heated) discussions online the only concrete criticism light snobs could downgrade the Bees for was not costing enough. The day I’m good enough to say, “you know, I could really use better strobes,” will be a good day indeed. (Although, I once thought I would never need more camera than the one I have now, and guess what? I think I’ve actually reached the stage where I would get better pictures with a better camera. No one is more surprised by that than I am.)

Lights!

My new Alien Bees, ready for work.

Anyway, the lights arrived today and I made a shambles of the living room unpacking boxes and setting things up. Pretty slick, huh? I’ll still be looking at accessories — first step, CTO gels to mix better with the ambient light, then maybe a softbox or two. We’ll see. There’s more than enough to keep me busy as it is.

Naturally, I wanted to get to work taking pictures right away, but it would not be fair to ask a human to sit through hundreds of experimental shots while I fiddle around with lights in the “lets see what this will do” mode. I asked my sweetie if I could borrow some shoes to shoot. She has a few pair kicking around. I figured shoes were interesting, and had an architectural quality. I wanted to see if I could capture the curves and forms with well-placed light.

shoes!

Still life with high heels.

I wasn’t very specific about what sort of shoes, but she came through with four shoes that each presented different lighting challenges. One high-contrast, another very shiny, and so forth.

I took a lot of pictures of shoes, at different angles and with different backgrounds. In some cases, the background was lit better than the shoe, in others, some details of the shoe were lost. In many you can see my reflection in the leather, not just the reflection of the lights (which is problem enough).

Note that I didn’t spend a lot of time choosing the photos to go in this episode — they’re decent examples but not necessarily the “best” — whatever that means. Each of these has something I like, however.

It became apparent pretty quickly that having lots of light is useless if you can’t control it. I knew this intellectually already, but there’s nothing like getting down there in the trenches to bring the lesson home.

more shoes!

Another still life with shoes.

I also got some fun serendipity along the way, like light reflecting off the lining of one shoe creating a great highlight in the heel of another.

I got a bit worried after a while, that I couldn’t turn the lights down enough to let me open the aperture to limit my depth of field. Now, there was a problem I didn’t anticipate. It turns out, as I was reviewing the photos to post here, I realized that my camera was still set to ISO 1600 from the other day. Tomorrow when set the speed down to a safe and sane 100, I’ll get much richer pictures and a lot more options for exposure. So, while these pictures have their flaws, I’m really excited about how my pictures will look after a few thousand more practice shots. Woo hoo!

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