Exercise 13. Shiny surfaces

For this final exercise of the assignment I chose to photograph a spoon that had reflective properties.
This is the spoon taken from above with no filtering of the light.  I am reflected in the spoon along with the camera.

 I then used a cone of the baking/tracing paper around the lens to try to filter out some of the reflections.

Here are the results:

After varying degrees of success starting with the first shot where the cone was not close enough to the spoon I managed to remove quite a lot of the reflections but never quite managed to get rid of them all.

Exercise 12. Concentrating light

For this exercise I used a similar object that I had used for exercise 10.  I then set my camera to use the flash and made a cardboard tube that fitted around the camera built in flash.  I then took various shots from different distances and with varying lengths of tube.

These are some of the results:

Narrow from close up

Narrow from distance

Narrow tube

Wide tube

Exercise 11. Contrast and shadow fill

Once again for this shoot I used a camera with a tripod fitted with a prime lens on aperture priority utilising a lamp and baking paper diffuser.

no diffuser

diffuser

white card meter away

white card half distance

Bringing white card nearer twice

White card very near

Aluminium foil dull side 1 m away

Aluminium foil dull side 0.5 m away

Aluminium foil shiny side 1 m away

Aluminium foil dull side 0.5 m away

It is clear that the shot with undiffused lamp and no reflector has the most contrast.  The inside of the box is darker and the shadows more pronounced.

The various types of reflectors have different degrees of effectiveness in reflecting the light and exposing the box.  

Exercise 10. The lighting angle

For this shoot I used a prime lens and tripod and placed a figure on a level table.  I used a lamp with a 40w bulb with a baking paper diffuser.

These are the shots:

Diffuser front and level

right and level

rear and level

level right

45 degrees front

Add caption

45 degrees right

45 degrees back

45 degrees left

Directly above

Above and behind

Above and in front

I quite like all the shots for different reasons.  The ones from the front give good definition of the subject and the ones from behind have a silhouette.

I think that my favourite is the one lit from directly above.  It has a little silhouetting and also good definition and contrast.

Exercise 9. Softening the light

For this exercise I choose a still life of a some eggs in their stand.  I set the camera up on a tripod looking slightly down on the eggs.  I used a lamp held directly above the eggs for the shots.  The first shot was with a naked light the second was diffused with some baking paper.

Naked light

Diffused light

 In the first shot the most noticeable aspect is that the eggs are more clearly defined and that the contours are more visible.  There are strong shadows both around the eggs and the holder.  The shadows in the first shot are much darker and stronger and have more definition.  The second shot is much softer generally, the edges of the shadows in particular have less definition and blend into the background.  The difference in the contrast between the two shots is also clear the, in the first shot there is clearly a greater contrast between the darks and lights.  

In this shot it is not clear to me whether the diffusion is an improvement as it depends on what you are trying to capture.  If it is a shot with plenty of detail then the naked shot is better, for a shot that is maybe more pleasing on the eye the second shot with the soft contrast is probably better.

Exercise 8. Outdoors at night

For this shoot I used my local city , Lincoln.  Lincoln has a lot of interesting buildings and like most cities is well lit at night.  I tried to take a variety of shots in different conditions.  For many of the photos I used a tripod and a wide aperture with my prime lens.