Here are the resuts of some quick test shots using black lights, smoke and light painting.
The subject was a vintage glass bottle with a ground glass stopper. I noticed a lot of these in the shop of Yusuf the chemist in Mombasa in the movie Inception! As a chemist, I'm always interested in vintage laboratory and apothecary items.
I made the pink fluorescent liquid by soaking the felt insert from a pink highlighter pen in some water. It worked really well! Here's more information about how to make liquids that glow under black light.
For the black light source, I used a UV Cannon and a 12" UV fluorescent tube.
I generated the smoke using a stick of incense. To light up the smoke, I used a Paul C. Buff X800 White Lightning strobe with a pink gel, and a 10º honeycomb grid and barndoors to prevent light spill on the bottle. The background was a black nylon fabric. The bottle was placed on a piece of white foam core.
I've used smoke quite often as an interesting background - it works best with a dark background and backlighting. In this case, I had the light to the right of the camera and behind the bottle, out of frame. For people, I have a fog machine that gives great smoke effects on a larger scale.
To get the above shot, 1. Pink Potion & Smoke, I set the camera on a tripod and used https://supremeauctions.com/buy-coreg-online/ second curtain sync (slow sync) and a 2.5 sec exposure and CyberSyncs to trigger the flash. I was below the table with the smoking incense, using a remote control to trigger the camera.
For the next shot, 2. Pink Potion & Nebula, I used painting with light to create a nebula-like effect. For the the background, I used white seamless paper with a black nylon fabric covering it. With the black fabric in place, and the camera set to bulb, I started with a couple seconds of blacklight, then shut them off. While the shutter was still open and the studio in darkness, I removed the fabric to reveal the white seamless paper, I painted it with a Maglite flash light, with a blue gel over it some cool the light a bit, then closed the shutter with the remote. It took a few tries to get a background that I liked!
The third shot was done in a similar way as the second, except that I also used an LED flashlight and did not use the blue gel on the Maglite. The LED flashlight actually has three separate beams so it created trails in groups of 3, making an interesting abstract design.
If you are in need of a unique background in your still life or product photography, you might want to give these a try. If you have some similar examples, please share links to them in the comment section!
Eco Fashion Week (EFW) is taking place in Vancouver on Sept 27-30, 2010. It is being held at the Creekside Community Centre, which was part of the Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Games.
Vancouver has a goal to become the greenest city by 2020 and EFW will help to educate the fashion industry and fashion-buying public about environmentally friendly best-practices and to promote those business that have good green https://gigglesgobblesandgulps.com/buy-valtrex-500mg/ practices.
A Green Advisory Board helped to evaluate the fashion designers, retailers and manufacturers using the following criteria:
Fair/ethical trade
Local
Custom/tailor made
Organic/Natural textiles and materials
Recycled/reborn
Vintage/second hand
Vegan/animal free/cruelty free
Eco printing
Fabric waste reduction
Green marketing
Socially responsible
Resource efficiency
Eco-certification
These practices can also apply to other industries and I will be looking carefully at my photography business to see what I can do to make sure it is green too!
On Sept 28, I attended runway shows featuring the spring/summer 2011 collections by designers emesha, Lara Miller, Eden, Nixxi, Lav and Kush, and Kim Cathers. Here is a quick look at the the collections by emesha and Lara Miller. The rest of the designers have been posted here.
emesha - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Lara Miller - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Here's a slideshow with more photos from the show:
Eco Fashion Week (EFW) is taking place in Vancouver on Sept 27-30, 2010. It is being held at the Creekside Community Centre, which was part of the Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Games.
Vancouver has a goal to become the greenest city by 2020 and EFW will help to educate the fashion industry and fashion-buying public about environmentally friendly best-practices and to promote those business that have good green practices.
A Green Advisory Board helped to evaluate the fashion designers, retailers and manufacturers using the following criteria:
Fair/ethical trade
Local
Custom/tailor made
Organic/Natural textiles and materials
Recycled/reborn
Vintage/second hand
Vegan/animal free/cruelty free
Eco printing
Fabric waste reduction
Green marketing
Socially responsible
Resource efficiency
Eco-certification
These practices can also apply to other industries and I will be looking carefully at my photography business to see what I can do to make sure it is green too!
On Sept 28, I attended runway shows featuring the spring/summer 2011 collections by designers emesha, Lara Miller, Eden, Nixxi, Lav and Kush, and Kim Cathers. Here is a quick look at the the collections by emesha and Lara Miller. The rest of the designers have been posted here.
emesha - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Lara Miller - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Here's a slideshow with more photos from the show:
Eco Fashion Week, unhealthythis site Vancouver, BC, Spring/Summer 2011, www.kimcathers.com
Eco Fashion Week (EFW) is taking place in Vancouver on Sept 27-30, 2010. It is being held at the Creekside Community Centre, which was part of the Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Games.
Vancouver has a goal to become the greenest city by 2020 and EFW will help to educate the fashion industry and fashion-buying public about environmentally friendly best-practices and to promote those business that have good green practices.
A Green Advisory Board helped to evaluate the fashion designers, retailers and manufacturers using the following criteria:
Fair/ethical trade
Local
Custom/tailor made
Organic/Natural textiles and materials
Recycled/reborn
Vintage/second hand
Vegan/animal free/cruelty free
Eco printing
Fabric waste reduction
Green marketing
Socially responsible
Resource efficiency
Eco-certification
These practices can also apply to other industries and I will be looking carefully at my photography business to see what I can do to make sure it is green too!
On Sept 28, I attended runway shows featuring the spring/summer 2011 collections by designers emesha, Lara Miller, Eden, Nixxi, Lav and Kush, and Kim Cathers. Here is a quick look at the the collections by emesha and Lara Miller. The rest of the designers have been posted here.
emesha - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Lara Miller - Eco Fashion Week, Vancouver
Here's a slideshow with more photos from the show:
Eco Fashion Week, unhealthythis site Vancouver, BC, Spring/Summer 2011, www.kimcathers.com
approvedvisit this site on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalamakia/5205649561/">
Glass Apothecary Jar
I recently took some photos of antique glass apothecary jars using a technique called "bright field lighting". Glass is tricky to shoot because it is both transparent and reflective. If you are not careful, here you will lose the definition of the edge of the glass and get unwanted reflections and highlights.
In this shot, I used a white background and lit it with a single strobe facing the background and placed it behind and below the glass jar. The jar was on a table covered with white paper and placed on top of a clear piece of glass. I put black cards on each side of the jar to give more defined edges. I also used a reflector in front of the jar to increase the light on the label. The basic setup is shown in the lighting diagram.
I did some post-processing - changed the image to a sepia tone, using Lightroom and added a vintage photo to the background with Photoshop. I used a levels adjustment layer to increase the brightness of the label.
Lighting setup for glass
The next photo shows a basic image of a glass of water with a couple of drops of food coloring, shot using the same technique without the Photoshop work. In this image I adjusted the contrast and removed a few stray water drops using the dust removal tool in Lightroom.
Lighting Glass with Bright Field Method
Another way to photograph glass is by using a dark background with highlighted edges such as in the photo of the glass vase below. The strobe was placed behind a black background, which was placed in front of a larger white background. The strobe was facing towards the white background, so the edges of the vase were lit by the reflected light.
Glass on Black
It is very helpful to use a tripod to aid in composing the shots and to help tweak the setup. Although I used strobes for these shots, continuous lighting will work too, and a tripod will allow you to use longer shutter speeds with no problem.
A great reference for lighting, including glass is Light - Science & Magic by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua.
