Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

1/1600 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)  Today’s lighting technique was inspired by a post in Dustin Diaz’s 365 project.  Dustin’s “Day Two Hundred Seventy Nine” photograph shows a Zelda figurine lit by bouncing a single bare-headed flash off of a very nearby wall.  He used a t-shirt to act as a gobo to prevent the light from contaminating the background.  You can see his setup shot here.

I wanted to try and reproduce the lighting effect for my project.  The most interesting object I could find in short order was my grandmother’s old travel alarm clock.  You know your clock is old when it has four dials on the back: two to set the time and alarm, and two to wind up the springs for the movement and alarm bell.

Instead of pulling up Dustin’s setup shot while creating my scene, I tried to do it all from memory.  Unfortunately, I got a few things wrong which prevent my background from going entirely black.  First, I had the flash too far away from the wall.  I remember Dustin having a four foot measurement, but instead of placing the clock four feet away, I placed my flash four feet away from the wall.  Also, I goofed on the proximity of the background to the subject.  In Dustin’s shot, the Zelda figure looks to be two to three feet away from the background.  In my shot, the background was over fourteen feet away!  This mistake let far too much ambient light into my photograph which made it impossible to bring the background to black and still keep detail in the clock.

Dustin also taught me another neat still life trick with this shoot.  The use of a black piece of clothing draped over a box on which the subject sits produces a very clean and undistracting stand for these types of shoots.