Red & White - Part 5

[Manfred M]

This is an image that did not work out quite as well as I had hoped.

The saucer has glazed and unglazed areas and I wanted to get them to pop a bit, which took a lot of brute force of sharpening and clarity. I wanted a high key look and had hoped to add a bit of raking light to accentuate the pattern, but that added shadows where I did not want them, plus a few other issues.

I also wanted to better control the reflections from the overhead light in the water in the cup. A partial solution was to clip a large piece of polarizing film over my light and dialed the effect down with a polarizing filter over my lens. It helped, but not as much as I had hoped.

[xpatUSA]

This is an image that did not work out quite as well as I had hoped.

The saucer has glazed and unglazed areas and I wanted to get them to pop a bit, which took a lot of brute force of sharpening and clarity. I wanted a high key look and had hoped to add a bit of raking light to accentuate the pattern, but that added shadows where I did not want them, plus a few other issues.

I also wanted to better control the reflections from the overhead light in the water in the cup. A partial solution was to clip a large piece of polarizing film over my light and dialed the effect down with a polarizing filter over my lens. It helped, but not as much as I had hoped.

Sometimes wavelet processing can help in such matters along with a dose of deconvolution sharpening:



With high-key work we are often stymied by the "knee" curve applied at high levels with some cameras in an effort to increase apparent "DR" but which reduces contrast compared with the higher slope at the mid-tones.

With some images, I get much better highlight contrast with linear gamma ... but there might be some disagreement about that ...

[Manfred M]

Sometimes wavelet processing can help in such matters along with a dose of deconvolution sharpening:


With high-key work we are often stymied by the "knee" curve applied at high levels with some cameras in an effort to increase apparent "DR" but which reduces contrast compared with the higher slope at the mid-tones.

With some images, I get much better highlight contrast with linear gamma ... but there might be some disagreement about that ...

Ted - that is not the issue with the image and I had it very much along the lines as your image, but backed it off as I did not want the definition to be that hard. The key are of interest in the image is the swirling red dye and I don't want the saucer's pattern to interfere with that. I've rarely had any issues working in high key situations.

I'm somewhat limited by the room I'm shooting in; the ceiling height is only around 7ft and that restricts how high I can set my lights. I have to shoot with everything on the floor and my light stands are not built for shooting that low down, so positioning them is a bit of an issue.

The issue is lighting the interior of the cup with the swirling food colouring without having significant reflections from the lighting. There are ways to set up the lights to exclude the reflection, but that introduces shadows from the sides of the cup. The way to minimize the shadows is to light from directly above, but that introduces reflections in the water. I tried to minimize those by putting a sheet of polarizing gel on the light and then shoot with a polarizing filter on the lens. That gives me an 80% solution; it reduces but does not 100% eliminate the reflection.

If this started to look like a real "wow" image, I would keep on going and try something else. As it is not, I'm going to sit on this for a bit. I am taking a course from a photographic lighting expert starting in June, so hopefully I will be able to get some ideas from him

[xpatUSA]

Ted - that is not the issue with the image and I had it very much along the lines as your image, but backed it off as I did not want the definition to be that hard. The key are of interest in the image is the swirling red dye and I don't want the saucer's pattern to interfere with that. I've rarely had any issues working in high key situations.

I'm somewhat limited by the room I'm shooting in; the ceiling height is only around 7ft and that restricts how high I can set my lights. I have to shoot with everything on the floor and my light stands are not built for shooting that low down, so positioning them is a bit of an issue.

The issue is lighting the interior of the cup with the swirling food colouring without having significant reflections from the lighting. There are ways to set up the lights to exclude the reflection, but that introduces shadows from the sides of the cup. The way to minimize the shadows is to light from directly above, but that introduces reflections in the water. I tried to minimize those by putting a sheet of polarizing gel on the light and then shoot with a polarizing filter on the lens. That gives me an 80% solution; it reduces but does not 100% eliminate the reflection.

Thanks for the clarification, Manfred. Interesting problem indeed. A wild thought occurs - a sheet of glass above, frosted one side (upper), at 45 degs then shoot the reflection from one side and fix any distortion in post ...

... would be interested in the lighting guy's thoughts if possible.

[Wavelength]

I really like this; the concept is wonderful