Still Life

Landscape photography is a bit slow this time a year so I thought I would get back to still life. I find still life so interesting but I find it so challenging. It's a lot harder that what you think and I'm still struggling. Unlike landscapes, the artist is totally responsible for the creation and many decisions must be made: What about a a theme and what's the subject matter? What angle should I use? What about a backdrop? The artist must decide and create everything. I'm just going to talk about lighting for a minute.

I started this session with a very nice lighting setup. I was using a portrait beauty dish that has very nice edge feathering and the light was a Godox AD200 TTL Flash Kit. TTL allows the camera and flash to coordinate with one another to give you a perfect exposure. It was great but it didn't look right. It was too much light, I couldn't get the angle right and it was too directional. It caused too many shadows and it just wasn't what I was looking for.

The next thing I tried was a light painting technique. I just used the Godox modeling light to "paint" the scene with the camera shutter open. Actually, I could have done this with just a regular flashlight but the Godox was giving a nice soft light so I went with it. This was great but it just wasn't giving me the "feel" I was looking for. Half the battle is knowing what you're looking for. I was picturing someone studying a map late at night by candle light. BINGO. I finally used a Bic multi purpose lighter. A 6-second exposure at F/11 did the trick. While the shutter was open, I moved the light around to keep the shadows to a minimum.

I suppose I could have played around longer using normal lighting techniques using color filters and light defusers but but this was easy. I used the length of time the lighter was lit to control the amount of light. I had it lit for about 4 of the 6 seconds. It took only 2 or three previous tries to get the exposure right. Sometimes you just don't need a lot of gear!