Show Off Your Setup

[Keith Tapscott.]

Keith, I try to get away without fill (so not to have a secondary source in contradiction). But I do feather off the source on the nearside, either with the edge of the brolly or with a flag close in. If there is need for fill, then I hang a sheet at the rear-end of the studio (on the camera axis, thus shadowless) and bounce some weak cold light off it (4 stops under).
Thats just any old halogen lamp - a Hedler with a fan. Could just as well be a flash head.
Bytheway I was mistaken about the Seitz RoundShot - thats the old 70mm version.

Thanks for sharing Chris. There might be something here that would be suitable for home still-life photography. Any suggestions?
http://prostudio360.com/home.php

[cjbroadbent]

Thanks for sharing Chris. There might be something here that would be suitable for home still-life photography. Any suggestions?
http://prostudio360.com/home.php

Keith, "If I'm posting here, I can't be much good" (Woody Allen). So take this lightly.
Paint yourself a background which feathers over from darkish to lightish and clamp it on the end of the kitchen table.
Stop futzing around with lights and just put an umbrella high at arms length to the left - or set yourself up with a window next to your left shoulder.
Place stuff in front of the camera so that the dark parts stand out against the light parts. Use a shortish lens.
Whatever; get a soft fat pencil and first learn to draw a box, a ball and a stick together, with shading.

From the brightest brightest spark of all time - Leonardo Da Vinci..
Trattato_Della_Pittura Chap. CLXXXVI. (course work for an academy that was never built)
"How high the Light should he in drawing from Nature.

To paint well from Nature, your window should
be to the North, that the lights may not vary. If
it be to the South, you must have paper blinds,
that the sun, in going round, may not alter the
shadows. The situation of the light should be
such as to produce upon the ground a shadow
from your model as long as that is high….
…..the nature of back-grounds, upon which any opake
body is to be placed. In order to detach it pro-
perly, you should place the light part of such opake
body against the dark part of the back-ground, and
the dark parts on a light ground;* as in the …."

Read it here:
http://www.archive.org/stream/davinc...0leon_djvu.txt
Or here in italian:
http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/...html/index.htm

[Keith Tapscott.]

Keith, "If I'm posting here, I can't be much good" (Woody Allen). So take this lightly.
Paint yourself a background which feathers over from darkish to lightish and clamp it on the end of the kitchen table.
Stop futzing around with lights and just put an umbrella high at arms length to the left - or set yourself up with a window next to your left shoulder.
Place stuff in front of the camera so that the dark parts stand out against the light parts. Use a shortish lens.
Whatever; get a soft fat pencil and first learn to draw a box, a ball and a stick together, with shading.

From the brightest brightest spark of all time - Leonardo Da Vinci..
Trattato_Della_Pittura Chap. CLXXXVI. (course work for an academy that was never built)
"How high the Light should he in drawing from Nature.

To paint well from Nature, your window should
be to the North, that the lights may not vary. If
it be to the South, you must have paper blinds,
that the sun, in going round, may not alter the
shadows. The situation of the light should be
such as to produce upon the ground a shadow
from your model as long as that is high….
…..the nature of back-grounds, upon which any opake
body is to be placed. In order to detach it pro-
perly, you should place the light part of such opake
body against the dark part of the back-ground, and
the dark parts on a light ground;* as in the …."

Read it here:
http://www.archive.org/stream/davinc...0leon_djvu.txt
Or here in italian:
http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/...html/index.htm

Thanks again. I have an old Courtenay silver/white reversible umbrella, but I was looking for a suitable continuous studio light.
Perhaps one which is balanced to daylight, hence the link. I'm not sure what to buy.

[cjbroadbent]

... I was looking for a suitable continuous studio light.
Perhaps one which is balanced to daylight....

Look at any cine/movie light that takes a quartz/tungsten bulb. If it has a fan it will last longer. Forget the far-from-perfect dichroic filters for daylight - Daylight colour film behaves badly with time exposures. Be wary of mono flash heads - unless you shoot wide open. Use the white side of the umbrella.
This thing, which holds brolly and lamp is one of the most useful and un-fussy tools.

[philipmorg]

My Sinar Norma set up to photograph still life. The softbox to the right of the camera is a homemade unit with two Interfit 150w fluorescent lamps. The light theoretically produces the output of a 1200 watt tungsten unit with much less heat!

Not shown is the Sinar reflex finder, which makes composing pictures much easier.

[William Whitaker]

...Be wary of mono flash heads - unless you shoot wide open...

What does that mean? I was hoping for some Alien Bees in my future.

[Mark Woods]

I use Speedotrons and have for years. Reliable and powerful.

[Frank Petronio]

I think Christopher means that with a lighting set up like his, where the head is into an umbrella and throwing a rather large spill, it uses up a lot of light.

A 400-800 watt monolight might give you f/5.6 or f/8 if you stuck in place of his hot light. For stopping down and getting into the f/16-22 range you'd want a more powerful light, like a big 4800-watt Speedo or a more efficient 2000-watt Dynalite (sticking my subtle bias in there!)

The big Alien Bee would probably be fine and for still life you can always do a T-exposure and give it multiple pops, 2 for a stop, 4x for two stops, 8x for three, etc. remember your binary math.

But don't sweat it. Most people do it that way because the focus on the wrong plane and they stop down too much to cover their ass. If you know what you want to focus on then just do that and shoot it wide open.

[John Bowen]

Any body else notice the beer bottle in post #3?

[Shen45]

To Christopher: Do you have an opinion on using a soft box relatively close to the setup but following the left hand positioning you suggest? The quality of light would be different but would you consider it lacked modelling of the set up? I used a Broncolour Hazylight for a lot of still life work but the light may have had too great a flattening affect because it tended to wrap around the objects so much.

I don't shoot studio style still life anymore but your explanation of your set ups has been very inspiring.