Assignment 7 - Discovering Light

Reflection

I found this to be the most interesting and challenging assignment so far. Here are my some observations:

I used Aperture Priority and a very long f-stop for all shots so that depth-of-field would work in my favor to compensate for any focus issues. With a tripod, I was not concerned about long exposures. I also used a low ISO of 200 to minimize noise.

Choosing the spot-metering reference point was very important. I took several exposures using different reference points. The results were dramatically different each time.

I found that I had to reshoot several times because photos that looked good on the camera screen didn’t look as good in lightroom.

I discovered that my camera generated raw and JPG when operated remotely via an app. For the dark images, the processing to generate the JPGs took up to a minute. When shooting normally, this does not happen. I haven’t figured out yet how to turn that off.

My first discovery was that High-Key lighting was a great example of how to find spots on your lens. I had to clean the lens and reshoot the segment.

As expected, the Front-Lighting assignment was the most boring of the group, because there were no shadows, so I added a stuffed toy in a vain attempt to make it look more interesting.

Low-Key lighting was fascinating. With an object that had multiple edges and angles, like the vase I was using, you get lots of very interesting shadows. There was a fair amount of dust on the vase which I decided to leave in place to give it some texture.

Top lighting in low key lighting yielded unexpected result, the light shone through the vase. Glass objects were interesting as the light was refracted in different ways.

The Backlighting assignment was very challenging to set up. I ended up using a translucent white plastic corrugated board as the “base” and a very white wall as the backdrop. I then set up a small round table with the plastic on top, left a gap at the back between the wall and plastic, and put the light underneath the table, so that the light shone up through the gap and lit the wall.

As expected, dark-colored glass generally did not work well. The only shots that worked well in this situation were when the light shined through the glass (making it appear lighter) rather than reflecting off the glass (making it appear darker).

I used 5K lights and set the white balance accordingly. Even with this, I had a adjust the white balance on every image. I placed a “grey card” at the edge of the photo so that I neutral reference point for setting the white balance and then cropped it out in the final photo. The gray card as reference did not work well for the dark images, so I ended up having to choose a spot on the subject instead for some of them.

Light painting was the most interesting part of this assignment. On my first attempt, I lowered the ISO to 100. I found a sixty-second exposure was inadequate, so I raised the ISO back to 200. Finding a white-balance reference point presented a challenge since a grey card really couldn’t be used since it was outside the painted area due to the nature of the assignment. Fortunately, the figurine I borrowed from my daughter had plenty of grey highlights, so I used a spot on the figurine instead as the reference point.

During the editing process, I straightened each photo, then set the white balance, cropped (to remove gray card) while keeping 2:3 aspect ratio. Then I adjusted the exposure, clarity or texture, and shadow and highlights. For the Low-Key Lighting photo, I also masked the background so that I could adjust the exposure on the background separately from the subject. In that case, the base of the set had too much refracted light from the vase, so I lowered its exposure by one unit compared to the vase.

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