Blue Spheres

Purpose: To show us how different lighting conditions affect different surfaces. There is diffused-smooth (Christmas ornament), diffused-rough (racquetball), specular-smooth (wine bottle), specular-diffused (orange), diffused-textured (bread--also the "white point")... and a person (to see the results on the face.

Set up: Different for every shot, but the sun/key is always coming from the left. See under the shot for more descriptions.

Shot 01/20. Sunny, BDE shot... this was actually at the "demo" that we had for this assignment. We were the demo group. Woo-hoo :) There is nothing else to the shot. Set up in the sun, made sure that the sun was at a 45 degree angle, properly exposed... no ratio needed.

Shot 17/20. Sunny, BDE shot. The sun is 70-90 degrees camera left to create a split lighting pattern on the face. There's a fill flash, near the camera, unfiltered, to create a 1:2 lighting ratio on the face (difficult because on top of being a small flash against the sun's power, it was diffused to create a nice even "glow". Diffusion = less light = more power from the flash which isn't possible, or to move the flash in closer and closer).

Shot 19/20. Sunny, BDE shot. The sun is positioned to create a split lighting pattern on the face. We put a scrim between the sun and the subject--basically, we took out the screen panel on the window of the apartment--this takes away light on the subject, so you have to up the exposure on the subject--while blowing out the background.

Shot 20/20. Same thing as the scrim in #19, except with a diffusion panel; this creates a nice, softer light that wraps around the face and gets rid of any specular highlights that might pop out.

Shot 05/20. Done in open shade with no sunlight visible. No modifiers.



We actually took shots 1 and 16-20 and 5 in for review by the teacher--and these are the 5/7 that passed (so far). This is a big project so we have a few weeks to shoot it, which is why I only have bits and pieces of it up. There are weekly reviews and we're meeting again on Sunday (3/30) to shoot the indoor/sunset/magic hour shots (7 shots total) and reshoot the 2 BDE shots that we didn't pass. As a general note, at Brooks, this assignment is also known as "blue balls" because it is so hard to get all of the lighting in these shots perfectly--it doesn't seem too bad at the moment, but we'll see how I feel at the end of all 20 shots :)

Assignment: 5/7 passed so far. 15/20 left to reshoot/take.