Monday, December 6, 2010

Day 115 of 365 - Life Does Not Seem Real


Photo by Andrew Kufahl

This was a shot I've been wanting to try for a while. Well, not necessarily this exact shot, but something along these lines. I'd have to say it was probably mostly inspired by the "Chasing Reflections" eBook by Eli Reinholdtsen (through the Craft & Vision series). The author's style in that book is a little more in the realm of "street photography" (which isn't really my thing), so I wanted to put my own spin on it.

I have had these windows lying around for quite a few weeks now (procrastinating on the project that caused me to pull them out), so I grabbed one and started doing some test shots. I was liking the results, so I moved down into the basement and started to put this together.

Time was a huge enemy of mine on this shoot. I didn't get started shooting for my 365 project until 11pm, and by the time I got around to testing out this window it was 11:30pm... I needed to get moving or it'd be another late night of shooting... and it was.

When I finally decided how I wanted to approach this photo, working the camera-angle out took a bit of time. I'm not only trying to get the window propped [compositionally] at a good spot and a good angle, but it's position will also dictate where the camera needs to be in order to get the reflection correctly composed. I'd be willing to bet it took nearly 20 to 30 minutes to resolve the camera angle.

While the camera angle was being worked out, I was also getting the main light in place. This was absolutely necessary to do at the same time, because I knew there was a chance there would be a conflict of the angle and the reflection and the position of the lightstand. Eventually, the lightstand became a annoyance that I didn't want to compete with, so I chose to double-super-clamp it from the ceiling.

The part of this shoot that I totally didn't anticipate, was [light] metering. I've been using a light meter pretty religiously for the past few months, and wanted to make sure my light-ratios were good on this one as well. However, I quickly found that a metering on the subject translates differently when that is captured as a reflection on glass. I'm guessing I would have had to use a different type of metering (metering off the glass instead of at the subject), so I ditched the light-meter and went with my gut.

I could have easily spent another 2 hours working on this shot. It was an awesome challenge to take on, and I can think of many other things I would have like to have tried. But, again, time is an enemy... and I whittled my sleep down to a measily 2 hours (oops).

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