Creative Tabletop Photography / Discuss

steveblackdog    says:

Well I hope the title has got some curious enough to open this thread and had better expain a little of what it is about.

The aim is to provide a project that almost anybody can try and no matter what the ability, by following along, will be able to get acceptable results. The subject might not appeal to all, but hopefully there will be something to learn. Now I confess to being a beginner myself and I was trying a lot of this for the first time, recording it as I went, thankfully, without too many mistakes. To give an idea of what you can expect to find, here is an example before we start to get a bit more in depth.

PLEASE NOTE : All the pics are clickable and larger versions available, just click on them. May be useful on the setups in particular. Also if you want to see the camera settings used, click on the "more properties" link on the right side of each photos page.



In order to make this so that as many members of the group as possible could try it, I have kept the equipment needed to a minimum. Even if you have a compact point and shoot camera, as long as you can turn off the flash, you should be able to follow along. I have to say though, an SLR (either film or digital) will make it a lot easier and the results more controllable. So here is a pic of the setup, I will follow on with a few notes to explain it.



I hope this shows how simple it is to set up for this and that you dont need a lot of space, this was all done on a small coffee table. Behind the coffee table is a white board to act as a reflector for the lights. A plain wall will work, but it needs to be smooth and white will give the best refections.
The lights are just normal desklamps fitted with 20watt compact flourescent low energy lightbulbs. If you are not sure what these are, ask and I will post a photo from which I'm sure you will recognise them.
You will also need a tripod or another way of supporting the camera for this, the shutter speeds used will not allow for a sharp image if you are holding the camera

Finally we come to the glass that we are going to photograph on. Now you dont need to use glass (more options in a moment), but in my opinion, it gives much better reflections than anything else. It does though have one problem, as do most clear materials, in that both sides of it will give reflections. Time for another photo which I hope will show this. If you look at the refection of the candle holder, you will see it is pretty messed up, as there are 2 refections close together.



The above pic was a sheet of glass with a piece of black card below it, which allows both surfaces to reflect. To overcome this, the best method I have found, is to paint one side of the glass with an aerosol of black paint, matt or gloss it makes no difference, just make sure the glass is polished first to remove fingerprints and the like. This will give you a black mirror in effect

Now you may be thinking, where am I going to find some glass :)
Well, probably the easiest for most people, will be to buy a cheap picture frame from a budget store, take the glass out and use that. One thing to be careful of though, most picture frames dont have the edges of the glass polished, so take care not to cut yourself. A strip of sticky tape along each edge witll help protect your hands.

As I mentioned above, there are alternatives to glass. The most popular is clear Acrylic sheet, this goes by different names in different parts of the world, Lexan, Plexi, Perspex are just a few that I can think of at the moment. This can be used in the same way as glass and will also take black paint in the same way. The biggest problem with Acrylic sheet though, is that it does scratch very easily and if you are going to use it often, continuous polishing will cause scratches in the surface fairly quickly. It is also more expensive than glass.

One final tip before we get on to taking some photos. To help keep your Glass or Acrylic sheet dust free and prevent the black paint from getting scratched in storage, a good idea is to cover it in clear food wrap, you know the stuff that is full of static electricity and sticks to itself. This will pic will hopefully help to show what I mean.



Well if anybody is still here and not got bored, time to take some pics, which I guess is why we are here. To start off with, a shot taken using the set up at the start. This was taken with my little Olympus compact, which I will continue to use for the shots of the various setups, but the photos of the subject will all be done with a DSLR (Canon 300D with kit lense), though wether you will be able to tell the difference, I'm not sure.



I hope you can see how the light reflected from behind works here. The board behind is reflecting the light forward and as the light fades as it gets higher on the board behind, it gets darker toward the front of the glass below. It is also worth noting, the reflection in the glass is all shadow. It is possible to also light from in front, but that is outside the scope of this piece, maybe I will come back to that at another time.

Now remembering that the reflection on the glass base is a mirror image of what is coming from the board behind, we will make use of this in the next shots. To start with, just placing a black bacground behind will give a completely different effect. Here is how it was arranged.



As you will see, the black card does not cover the whole of the background, just enough to fill the relection shown in the glass. There is still light being projected forward from the sides and above the black board. Next up the effect this gives.



I hope this illustrates how the light is altered by the black board behind and you will be starting to understand how this works. Worth noting here, is the way that it is getting lighter toward the foreground from where the light is hitting the background above the black board.

To help ilustrate this a bit more, lets add a coloured background instead.



So now we have a nice orange behind. Good and bright and should work well with the red candle in the holder. The orange is just two pieces of letter sized photocopy paper taped together with sticky tape. Note on the reflection on the glass, from this angle, you can see how it is brighter where it is close to the light source, gradually getting darker as you get further from the lights. This translates in to a gradual change from dark to light when you get down to camera level.



As you can see, this gives a completely different final image to the backgrounds used before. So lets try something else, rather than the nice warm feel of the orange, going to the opposite end of the spectrum, lets try a cool blue. Here it is all set up ready to go.



From this angle it doesnt look very special and it does look strange that the reflection in the glass is not filling the area. Thats just the angle it is viewed from. Here is what it looks like through the viewfinder.



Well, I think it is pretty cool anyway :)

I hope this has shown how playing around with the colours gives different effects and I'm sure there are many more out there waiting to be discovered.

I was going to leave it like this, but one more special effect to come to give a bit more of an abstract result. Here is how it was set.



As you can see, the black board behind is back in the frame. In addition to this, a piece of black card on either side to shield the light coming from the sides. What doesnt show very well here, is that there is a gap of about 1inch/25mm between the cards at the sides and the one at the back, which allows just a narrow beam of light through to reflect in the glass of the candle holder. Here is how it looks lit this way.



Note the way there is very little light in the centre and the narrow light has just illuminated the edges. By playing around with the postion of the lights and the ways you block it, all sorts of different effects are possible.

Well i guess thats as far as we go here at the moment. I hope some have stuck with it and maybe learnt something by reading through all this, but most of all, I hope it has encouraged some to have a play and experiment with something new.

If I have missed something, which is quite likely, or you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I will try to answer as best I can. I'm hoping that some results may start to appear in the "Reflections" theme thread, or if you try any of this, please also feel free to add your results in here. At least it would let me know if this was worth doing ;-)

Rather than leaving with 13 pictures though, not that I'm superstitious :) I will sign off with one final pic from my trusty little compact, I hope you enjoyed it.
Steve.


Originally posted at 8:57AM, 23 April 2010 PDT (permalink)
steveblackdog edited this topic 25 months ago.