Glass Jazz

[Mike Buckley]

Karm and Greg (FootLoose) discussed that my photo in this thread made them think of jazz. I didn't "get it" at first. Once I finally did, I decided to make the photo shown below. Hopefully it evokes even more of the look and especially the feel of jazz trumpets wailing away.

[rawill]

Just read the comments on the other 'jazz' thread.

I like this - certainly looks like Jazz to me.
On the photo:
Such clean lines.

Not a BW fan, but I am begining ot appreciate that some "shots" are better in BW.
This is one I understand.

Thanks Mike, and to all who post and comment.

[SpiderBob]

Another winner as far as I'm concerned. I'm really impressed with these Mike.

[FootLoose]

Brilliant, Mike! Although I might try angling them up a bit more to represent wailing.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, everyone!

Greg: I tried using more of an upward angle but the physical limitations of my makeshift studio prevented me from making it work. When I left the camera position as is and changed the angle of the glasses, the base of each glass took on a flatter look that resembled a trumpet less. When I changed the camera position to accommodate that situation, I captured the area beyond the white background.

This composition looks easy to set up, but I struggled with it for over an hour to get it to this point. One of my issues was being able to have the camera far enough away to get enough of the glass in focus without using focus stacking (which I don't do) yet not so far away that I captured anything beyond the white background. This is the first time I really wished that I owned a larger piece of white acrylic.

[Mike Buckley]

Not a BW fan, but I am begining ot appreciate that some "shots" are better in BW.
This is one I understand.

In an ideal situation, this shot would look exactly the same whether in black-and-white or color. That's because everything in the image is clear glass (though not perfectly clear as noted below), white acrylic and a light source at 5500K.

There are only two reasons I can think of to convert this style of image to black-and-white. One reason is to eliminate the color resulting from prismatic refraction that tends to occur when glass subjects are cut with straight lines. (There was no prismatic refraction in this photo.) The other reason is when either the subject or the glass tabletop is not sufficiently devoid of color. In this case, my glass tabletop is so thick that it has a strong green cast when shooting through it as opposed to using it to reflect light. I probably ought to try buying a thinner piece of glass but it wouldn't be strong enough to hold heavy subjects and I'm still not sure that a thinner piece wouldn't exhibit the green cast. I assume a far more expensive glass tabletop could be made without the green tint but don't know for sure.

For examples of images that appear to have been converted to black-and-white but are actually shot and post-processed in color, see this thread that I started a year ago when I was at the very beginning stages of learning this stuff. The third photo in that thread displays some "color" but the first two don't, at least not to my eyes which aren't all that great.

[Digital]

Mike, nice capture.

Bruce