Reflection

When I started this exercise I was pretty worried that I did not have enough light or the wrong kind of light. I was used to shooting with flash for photos like this so I felt that without a proper strobe light I would have issues getting good lighting on the images.

I originally planned to shoot fruit like was suggested but then the rose corsage had just been given to me and I thought I would see how much I could use it to demonstrate the different kinds of light. I used a desk lamp and a streaming light as light sources, and some packing styrofoam from a light I had purchased for my white backdrop. 

I was sure I did the high key and low key shooting completely wrong and kept trying to figure out what it should look like. I did like the airy nature of the first photo but not all parts of the rose was in focus, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

One of my limitations when shooting was that I was shooting on my desk and the black board I had tagged the rose to was not wide enough to cover the base of the photo if I shot using landscape so I chose to shoot portrait, partly also because the rose was upright. I ended up with a lot of space above the photos which did not look great from a composition perspective, but in my mind as I was shooting I was only focusing on the light! That was definitely a mistake and a good learning. 

As I started to move the lights around, I tried to keep my ISO at the same reading and use the exercise to understand where I had struggled with light in the past. I was surprised how different the rose looked based on the position of the light, and I was intrigued by how the settings of the camera influenced the look of the photos. I would normally have been pretty quick to get into lightroom and edit my photos to what I thought was the right lighting, but in this case except for the back light which seemed like it was too little light to make the photo that useful, I was pretty excited by what I got. 

For the diffused light I put bubble wrap over the desk lamp that I used to take the first photo of the tangerines, and I was dumbfounded at how the light changed. While I still got vibrant light, the softness of the light was quite obvious. 

This was a really great exercise for me because studio lighting has always been a challenge for me when it comes to photography. I feel like while I liked the photos I still struggled with my settings and with making sure I was adjusting the right part of the triangle (Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO).

Probably my favorite photo by far was the light painting. I had heard of light painting before and seen the fancy things people did with it, but I didn’t think I could do it. I had several failed attempts before I realized that I could actually expose just parts of the rose that I wanted to by running the light of my cell phone over it. The swirly light came from some decor string lights that I had and I just wanted to see what would happen if I swung them over and around the rose while I exposed the rose. I was not expecting it to come together like it did. I really wasn’t. There was some light leaks but I was happy with how the light painting turned out ultimately.

Another pretty big takeaway for me from this exercise was setting white balance. I had always heard about setting your custom white balance but never knew how it was done in camera. And being able to set my custom white balance was so so so exciting because it allowed me to be confident that I was shooting at the right white balance. I think I struggled with it at first so some of my images had a slight blue tone, but just learning how to do it in camera was incredible. 

This exercise was a really good precursor to the still life exercise because it forced me to really pay attention to the effect of the direction of light on imagery.