Thursday, February 26, 2009

Rockin' the white background

Rockin' on white

Foth Derby, circa 1940

Cell structure
I'm using my down time in between looking for a job, looking for freelance work (and actually doing the freelance projects I'm finding) to work on fine tuning some studio photography skills. These shots were taken on white posterboard ($1.50 at Office Max). The cell phone was placed on a mirror ($12 at Home Depot) with a sheet of white foam board held at an angle to reflect a white background into the shot ($1.99 at Office Max).

They were lit with a 4-foot fluorescent light fixture ($9.50 at Home Depot) and two 40-watt daylight-balanced fluorescent tubes ($9.95 at Home Depot). A small scrap of white foam board was used to reflect some light into the shadow areas (cost negligible) and an old school on-camera flash unit was bounced off the ceiling to provide some extra fill and blow out the background (the flash unit was a Christmas gift in 1984).

When your photography game has mostly been natural light for twelve years or so, the transition to artificial light is simultaneously daunting and liberating. It helps that I have all that expensive lighting equipment at my disposal. (Actually, disposal is where I find a lot of my equipment.)

And a big thanks to those of you who let me know what you think about the new blog template. Nobody reported any problems with how things showed up on your browsers, so that's a good sign. I spent some time yesterday tweaking the HTML code to move things around - I know just enough about coding to be dangerous. I guess you could say the same thing about my lighting technique.

So far so good.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work on these. The new template looks good.

Dawning Inspiration said...

Blogger told me my comment didn't take so I'll rewrite!

Love the white rocks on white background - gorgeous image!

Your new format is great too. Thanks for sharing all the info on the lighting techniques you use. I'm going to try some things out soon with derivatives of your techniques!

Property#1 said...

Excellent work, much like DIY light box but much simpler, very nice