Let There Be Light !

Those who know me can tell that I do not own a studio or any other "pro" equipment. All I have is my camera and 2 flashes. Luckily, getting a good result, which is a good photo, does not always mean that one should own a studio (or rent one). What I mean is, the thing that I love in photography is that you do not always need to buy or build a complicated setup, but you can do it at your home, sometimes on your own bed, right after the idea came up to your mind.

And this is exactly what I did this time.

In this post I would like to talk about the following photo:



The idea came up while reading a book in my room. I used this bulb, and unintentionally I took a glimpse at it, and then saw the light and the reflection on it. It made me wonder how I can make a photo from this, the bulb and the reflection that showed nicely its contour.

Using the correct exposure, I can catch the light of the filament, but then the reflection will not be seen since it is not strong enough. When you expose on the filament, almost everything except it will be dark, because it is an extremely strong light and nothing in the area can match it. Yet, catching only the filament is not such a big deal - I wanted to catch in addition to it some light on the glass enclosure that will emphasize its outline, so I understood I need some other strong-light-source that will simulate the reflection: my SB600 flash.


However, trying to use the flash alone will result in a "hard" light that will not look good on the glass enclosure of the bulb, and what I wanted to get is a soft and easy light to show only the outline. The problem is that the flash is very small and fires a high contrast light, and we need some light source to be much bigger than the bulb. To solve this, I have used White Foam Core. The flash fires on the white board, that reflects the light on the bulb, so from the bulb's point of view, the thing that lights it is much bigger, hence softer, than the direct flash. This way we end up with a good exposure on the filament, against a dark background, and a nice contour of the enclosure of the bulb.

In the following photo, you can see the setup... on my bed, everything is improvised on the moment.