Sunflower

I don't know how it so quickly got to be so long since my last post...

In the previous post I'd said that maybe I'd spring for some flowers to do some lightbox (or "lighttent" if you prefer, though what I built is actually much more a box) work. Well, I did pick up what I thought was a nice collection of interesting flowers and proceeded to snap a 'few' shots then started working on a couple of pictures but I just wasn't at all happy with the results, either out-of-camera or after processing.

I'd actually decided to give up on that set completely, and in fact hadn't touched anything for some time. This evening, I decided that I really ought to take another look and see if there wasn't something I could do with at least one of the shots - this is the result.

Like many/most of the pictures I post, I'm still not 100% happy with this one. It is, however, fair to say that it's a darn sight more satisfying than any of my previous attempts.

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Light Box Chess Set

After my last post I felt motivated to build a "cheap" light box for more control over lighting shots such as that one. Finding myself with some time to fill last Friday afternoon I did a little shopping to see what I could come up with.

It didn't stay a cheap project for very long, although it certainly didn't cost anything like what a more purpose-built system would cost.

Unfortunately, while I saved a bit of money I had to sacrifice other things. In this case, although I'd coughed up the bucks for some decent full-spectrum bulbs, I still found the results horribly colour-cast. Thank goodness I shoot digital, as this white balance error can be corrected realively easily... well, mostly. There's still something a little wrong with the corrected colour of this shot although I'm not sure just what it is. But aside from that, the over-all lighting effect isn't bad, specially considering that I was stupid enough to select such a highly reflective item for my first test subject.

If I can scrape a couple of bucks together next weekend I think I'll buy some nice flowers to see what I can do with them in a controlled lighting environment. They, at least, should not be reflective.

[Oh, almost forgot... In case you missed my late-addition comment to my last post, I've had to add in comment moderation due to some asshole trying to use the comment section of my blog to plug his own - for all I know virus infected - stuff.  He loaded up an identical comment (Chinese characters) full of links to other sites to almost 200 of my posts before I cut him off.  I've since deleted all his comments; it was faster for me to do this than the time it took him to load them, so nuts to him.  Comments related to my posts and this blog are still welcome and encouraged, but you'll have to have patience for them to appear on the site as now I have to approve them first - I'll probably only check for new comments once a day.]

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