Glasses and Flash

I was chatting to my son about light and some of the challenges you have when trying to take photos of glass.  So, to illustrate the point, we grabbed a few glasses from upstairs – nothing fancy as there was a high chance things would get broken – and headed down into the basement!  The glasses were placed on my light table which has a glossy white plastic surface. We tried a few different configurations, just to illustrate how we could change the appearance of the image by where we placed the light source.

Ambient light shot
Ambient light shot
 This is the first shot. Taken with available light from the window to camera left. You can see a range of reflections on the glasses – I really must tidy up in the basement! Anyway, besides seeing all the clutter in the reflections you’ll notice the glasses seem to blend into the background. Instead of looking at the shape of the glasses you’re probably looking to see just what the clutter is in my basement!

Single flash from below
Single flash from below
 
 
 
Same setup as before, except this time I placed a speedlight under the light table. This gives quite a different effect. No longer are the reflections of the basement clutter so obvious and you get a much better idea of the shape of the glasses. One thing I’ve learnt is that when you play with glasses have a clean cloth handy so you can remove your greasy finger prints!

Light from behind with gels
Light from behind with gels
 
 
 
 
Next we decided instead of having the background predominantly white with the form of the glasses being black to swap things round. Now we tried a black background and had the glasses being white – or another colour! This time a gobo was placed behind the glasses and two white reflectors placed on the left and right of the glasses. The white light table was replaced with foamcore with some glass under the glasses to give some reflections. We also placed some gels in front of the flash to get some different colours.

Light from behind with gels
Light from behind with gels

We used the gel filters from the studio lights; yellow red and blue. The first shot used the yellow gel, but then using both yellow and blue gave us green as you see in this image.

Remember that I mentioned I had two white reflectors on each side of the glasses? Well, for the last shot we used two speedlights on low power fired through red and blue gels at these reflectors as well as a third speedlight behind the gobo as in the two previous shots.

Light from behind with gels
Extra coloured speedlights left and right

So there you go, a bit of fun with a speedlight or two in the basement. Good fun and I think my son learnt a little as well as had some fun with the filters, reflectors and speedlights.

Feeling much happier!

A few weeks ago at the Matariki celebrations in Henderson one of my cameras, my Nikon D800, started to misbehave.  The autofocus mechanism did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do and was doing an autoUNfocus.  There was nothing I could do with the camera to resolve the problem. I tried cycling the power (removing and reinserting the batteries), doing a factory settings reset, changed lenses, changed focus modes (AF-C, AF-S), single point focus, or use all 51 point.  Absolutely nothing worked.  It was well and truly stuffed.  Then I decided to try LiveView.  this worked!  I switched back to viewfinder and unbelievably autofocus was back on track again!

Alan Brown playing with the Alan Brown Project.
Alan Brown playing with the Alan Brown Project.

The camera misbehaved a couple more times that evening, and each time the LiveView trick brought viewfinder focus back to life again. I got the camera checked and no errors were reported. Happy that all was apparently good I continued using the camera with no issues until the Native Noise event at the Town Hall with Che Fu organised by Evitan.  Same problems as before.  Two green arrows indicating the camera couldn’t focus!

This time a more thorough investigation was conducted and the camera was in the shop for a few days.  Again, no faults identified and the camera passed all tests.  I must admit to feeling both dismayed that nothing had been identified as well as pleased that the camera had passed all tests.  Time to test it again, this time on the Whangaporoa Peninsular when I went to shoot Take Note.

All was going well, really well and I thought the fault had been fixed … until about an hour into the shoot.  Same again.  Two green arrows and no focus.  I felt sick.  Was it me?  I certainly wasn’t imagining what was happening and I couldn’t identify any action I was taking to cause the problem and switching to LiveView and back again did fix the problem.

I was losing all confidence in  the camera and started using my D300 in preference to the D800 now.  The D300 had been faultless since day one and I could trust this workhorse.  I’d missed shots with the D800 and was seriously disappointed with it so back it went to the workshop.

It came back on Wednesday and as soon as I attached a lens and started to use it I could sense there was something different.  It sounds silly, but it just seemed to have been “tuned” or “tweaked”.  I now had the D800 I’d fallen in love with last year.  I was delighted … but how would it be with the bands?  No worries!!  I took it out last night to see Cherie Mathieson singing with the Alan Brown Project.  I was determined to put the camera into the same type of conditions that had caused it to fail previously.  Was I disappointed?  Not at all.  The camera was a dream to use and behaved perfectly for the two hours I was shooting.  Happy?  I’m stoked!!

Here’s a few shots of Cherie from last night.  ISO 5000, f2.8, 1/125sec, 85mm f1.4G, Nikon D800

So, how did the fault get fixed?  Well, the folks at Nikon (Macalister‘s here in NZ) did a superb job.  They replaced the viewfinder autofocus mechanism, recalibrated, tested and ensured the camera passed all tests before giving it back.  End result?  A seriously stoked Nikon user with one wicked D800 😉