Children's Wooden Blocks

[Manfred M]

I picked up some additional lighting gear over the past few months, but have not been able to spend a lot of time with it until today.

I picked up a couple of Godox AD200 Pro II battery powered flashes (really something in between a speedlight and a studio flash) and an optical snoot and some gobos to project patterns on the subject. I also bought a Godox V1 speedlight to go with the Fujifilm camera.

This is very much a first attempt, so I have a long way to go. I used a 20" x 20" / 50cm x 50cm square softbox that I am using for some of my still life work. That was my key light and that gave me some nice, soft light. I used one of the AD200 Pro II here, configured with the bare bulb flash head. I had to feather the light because the hot spot was a bit overpowering.

I used the V1 as my fill light and that cast some nice hard shadows. The second AD200 powered the optical snoot and gobo. This unit has a 50mm lens and I can adjust the sharpness of the shadow.

The inspiration was some children's blocks that we dug out for my youngest grandson (16 months old now) when he visited for 5 weeks this summer. These belonged to his mother and aunt when they were children and a few of my ancient blocks (almost 70 years old, I suspect) that I played with as a child.

I think the next iteration is going to use some white and black seamless paper to see how that works. I might bring out the smoke machine to add in some atmosphere... Stay tuned...

[C J Southern]

They certainly add many more tools to the toolbox - and it's always fun to play with new tools.

I always enjoyed working with hard light sources; I think it's true to say that their casual placement is "less forgiving of any positional error", but they can certainly produce a refreshingly different kind of image; especially with the likes of frilly dresses and other "3 dimensional" clothing. I found it good to break out of the usual "soft light, soft reflector" type portrait setup.

I recall Joe McNally telling the story of when he photographed Michelle Pheiffer; she had an expensive piece of jewelery hanging on a chain from her neck (that looked best with hard light) ... but apparantly she was adament that "there was no way in 'heck' that he was going to use hard light anywhere near her face!

The blocks remind me of my first day at school - we had blocks like that that I played with ... before hiding under a chair and walking home at morning tea time ... where mum promptly "walked me right back again" ...

[billtils]

Looking forward to the return of the smoke machine!

[Manfred M]

I agree Colin - in fact using hard light in portraiture has become quite trendy over the past decade or two, as well as in advertising photography. I have started to add a hard light source in some of my work, especially as a fill light. I also work more with on-axis lighting and will work with graduated light in still life work.

[Manfred M]

I've picked up a second Smoke Ninja pro, with a couple of interesting accessories; once creates more of a haze and the second one creates bubbles with smoke in them. I hope to use multiple smoke sources in some shots.

My schedule is going to get very busy for the next 8 weeks and I hope to get some outdoor shooting done while the weather is still fairly pleasant. By the end of October and to the end of the year, I expect to be back at still life work in the studio.

[C J Southern]

I agree Colin - in fact using hard light in portraiture has become quite trendy over the past decade or two, as well as in advertising photography. I have started to add a hard light source in some of my work, especially as a fill light. I also work more with on-axis lighting and will work with graduated light in still life work.

I've always taken an attitude of "if the image works then it's OK to have broken the rules". I shot this with 4 equal hard light sources resulting in a "flat" image - took a bit of "stick" for it from another photographer, but I thought it was a good result.



Can't say I've had much success with smoke generators though; I have a couple of mains powered ones but found that I mostly just ended up with poor contrast (much the same as when shooting in fog).