eriksweeklyphoto's photostream

Last weekend my wife asked me to install a new faucet in our kitchen sink. "No problem," i said, after looking over the instructions. "It'll only take a few minutes." Nine hours and three trips to the hardware store later, we had a working kitchen sink. Bolt cutters weren't among the list of recommended tools for the job, but hey, a man's got to do what a man's got to do. This nut was one of the leftover parts.

To make this shot, I clamped the wrench to a boom and set up my camera on a tripod in front ot it. Then I walked around to the other side, peared through the nut, and fired the remote shutter. This was a two light setup. The wrench and nut were lit by a ring flash on camera. I was lit by a flash fired bare from camera right. I used my Tamron 90mm macro lens at f/16.

I took this image for the Strobist Sundays theme "lines and curves" and the Typical Shutterbug theme "straight lines." The image was inspired by this awesome photograph from Rollabldr.

I took this image in an attempt to improve my group portraits. I wanted to see if I could light several objects from the side with a single, close key light without significant light falloff. This sounds easy, but it's actually a little tricky. When you push a light in close from the side, you have to address the inverse square law, which implies a very steep falloff in light intensity as one moves farther away from the light source. If I'd simply pointed the key light at the center pomegranate, the left-hand pomegranate would have appeared much brighter than the right-hand one.

The three pomegranates were lit by a single YN-560 through a 42 inch white umbrella positioned about three feet away 45 degrees off axis to camera left. To get even exposure on the three fruits, I feathered the umbrella so that the shaft was parallel to the line of the pomegranates. As a result, the left most fruit received less direct light than the right most fruit. Before I started shooting I checked to see that the light falling on each fruit metered f/6.3. For this image I decided to boost the exposure a bit by setting my camera's aperture to f/5.6. I positioned a black card above the fruit to prevent unwanted reflections and draped a black umbrella cover over the camera side of the umbrella to prevent lens flare.

We left this shallot in the pantry a little too long. I don't think it's still edible, but it was fun to photograph.

I shot the shallot suspended about four feet in front a white wall. I put one flash bare on the wall and one flash through a softbox from camera right on the subject. Black cards to the right and below the subject prevented spill from the background light. A white card to the left provided fill on that side. The wall metered f/6.3 and the shallot metered f/5.6. The camera was set to f/5.6.

I edited out the string in post. Other than that and a crop, this is straight out of the camera.

This chart reflects my attempt to gain a better understanding of lighting ratios and the additive qualities of light.

For every image my camera was set to f/5.6 at ISO 160. I metered the key light (a flash through a 24 inch softbox at 45 degrees camera right) at f/5.6 and varied the power of the fill light (a flash through a small umbrella on axis behind the camera). For example, the top row shows fill and key of equal exposure (both f/5.6) while the second row shows a key one stop brighter than the fill (f/5.6 vs. f/4.0). The far right column shows the results of using both light together and reports the resulting highlight-to-shadow ratio.

A few practical lessons can be drawn from this chart. First, observe that light is additive, so in this example the highlight region is brighter than the exposure from the key light alone. This effect would be reduced somewhat had I used a 45-45 fill-key lighting setup rather than the 0-45 setup, because there would have been less overlap between key and fill. Second, notice that beyond a 3 stop difference between key and fill, there is really no discernible difference between the resulting images. The final two rows are virtually identical. I don't know the precise dynamic range of my camera (a Nikon D7000) but I suspect that this difference may simply be too subtle for the digital sensor to convey.

This very short slide show illustrates the effect of varying the angle of a key light on a subject. I made this video for the Strobist 102 (2012) assignment "light position, angle."

The video is a sequence of shots of my little Degas bronze statuette, each taken from a fixed camera position as I rotated a single flash around the compass headings. The flash was fired through a DIY (black straw) grid from about 35 degrees above the subject. The flash was set to give me an f/6.3 incident light reading at the subject position. I held the flash power and flash-subject distance constant throughout the exercise.