If any of you are not watching what Ursula Abresch is doing with her camera, you should be. Her "Spirits" entry in the "Painting With Light II" challenge was a truly phenomenal image. I remember the last "Deja Vu" challenge quite well. I also remembered my hesitance to 'duplicate' the image to the best of my abilities. I don't believe duplication is a good idea unless you can improve the original in some way. In my "Deja Vu" entry, I based my entry on one of Gordon McGregor's previous challenge winners, but I twisted his theme a bit to make the image my own. I'm doing basically the same thing with this entry, and oddly enough, I'm basing it on another "Painting with Light." I had actually asked Ursula a couple weeks ago if she minded me working with her idea. Our camera club has a "Painting with Light" topic coming up this summer and now seemed like a good time to get started on it. I can enter up to three images in that competition, and this is going to be the first of those three.
The Technique:
These photos are really fun to do. One of the most interesting things about painting with light is the fact that you never get two takes that look the same. I went shopping to find an interesting glass to use. I setup my tabletop studio with a large piece of black velour because of its flat black non-reflective properties. I gave myself plenty of space behind my glass so I could maneuver my light. I used a rather small flashlight wiht several layers of white paper towels wrapped over the top of it. The towels diffused the light source to a soft glow. I just waved the light around behind the glass for a few seconds, trying to come up with light patterns that looked interesting. It's critical to keep the light behind the subject when using glass. If you get out in front of it, you will have ugly reflections on the glass surface. After I composed the shot with the camera on the tripod, I turned off all the lights in the room (working at night). I used my cable release with the camera in bulb mode to shoot the image.
The color of the light here is natural. I had my camera in auto white balance mode, so my incandescent light source created this color naturally.
EXIF:
File: IMG_6087.CR2
File size: 6,696KB
Image Serial Number: 560-6087
Camera Model: Canon EOS 20D
Camera serial number: 0420100366
Firmware: Firmware 2.0.0
Owner: John M. Setzler, Jr.
Date/Time: 2006:03:19 00:20:14
Shutter speed: 21 sec
Aperture: 22
Exposure mode: Manual
Flash: Off
Metering mode: Evaluative
Drive mode: Continuous: frame 1
ISO: 100
Lens: 24 to 70mm
Focal length: 24mm
AF mode: Manual Focus
Image size: 3504 x 2336
Image quality: Raw
White balance: Auto
Color space: sRGB
Saturation: Normal
Sharpness: Normal
Contrast: Normal
Sharpness level: 0
Tone: Normal
Custom Functions:
CFn 2: Long exposure noise reduction: On
CFn 8: ISO expansion: On
Statistics
Place: 7 out of 141 Avg (all users): 7.0891 Avg (commenters): 8.0588 Avg (participants): 6.8313 Avg (non-participants): 7.2689 Views since voting: 3015 Views during voting: 353 Votes: 202 Comments: 24 Favorites: 6 (view)
Awesome!!! What amazing colors! And I love the smooth but crystal clear and sharp lines in the glass. Amazing! Ribbon quality once again. Congratulations! 10
Wow, this is absolutely beautiful! So smooth, so elegant - you did a beautiful job with this. I don't know what else to say, I am trying to think that it might be inspired by my own painting with light entry from a couple weeks ago, the "feeling" of the image reminds of it (and if I'm wrong, please forgive my ego). But this is different. Anyway. Congratulations on a beautiful image.
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