Still Life

This morning we went back into the cove to concentrate on doing a still life shoot as the last time we were in the cove we didn't have time to do a shoot. We started the session by recapping the camera, lighting and other device settings so that we could remember from what we got taught 4 weeks ago and so that we could remember how to do if we rent the studio out in the future. Because we were in the cove we had the flash lighting which I like because its not continuous lighting so it is safer even though there is more to remember. There was quite a lot of us in the studio, too many to be able to share one area so we all split into smaller groups and made our own infinity curve by getting a oiece of coloured paper and taping or holding it in a way that there was a curve in the paper which made our pictures look smooth. My group had a piece of green paper but we soon realised after taking a few shots that the green background didn't suit any of objects so we changed the coloured background to pink. Our photos were all taken on f16 with a shutter speed of 1/125 so that it was in sync with the flash lighting and an ISO of 200 as that is the lowest ISO a Nikon d90 will go to.

Above is the main set up that I used in the studio. I created this diagram on www.lightingdiagrams.com

My images that were taken using the green background came out either very bright with the light reflecting on the perfume bottles or came out with big dark shadows. When my images came out too bright with the light reflecting off the perfume bottles I changed the position that the light was but then that changed my images to have a big shadow. I like the images that have the shadow more than the ones that are really bright but on some of the images you can see the very edge of the table where the green paper didn't touch.

These two images (above and below) I quite like because they're not too bright and they have the shadow behind showing that the light is hitting from the left hand side. When I had finished shooting with the green background I wanted to try with a different background, so I tried with pink.

These are the images that I tried on the pink background. I think that some of the pictures look okay on the pink background but some you can see the table again and some are still quite bright. I like tthe image below because I like the way I have laid the bottles out and the bottle with the pink label is lying on the floor so it don't clash with the background too much. However, on some of my other images the pink clashes an blends in too much with the backdrop.

I love these images because I took these with a macro lens which means that I can be at the same distance I was when taking the other photos but the lens makes everything more zoomed in. By using the macro lens I got more detail on the bottles and got more of a depth of field even though the aperture was on the same as before, f16. One thing that I could have done to improve was to zoom out a little bit to get more of the top of the bottles in the picture but I am still happy with how they turned out.

Overall, I am more happy with my images taken with the macro lens but I do like mostly all of my pictures but prefer the ones on the pink background.