Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Day 88, 365 Day Project.

For your consideration, three images, all of the same subject but with slight variations. When thinking about what I wanted to do for today's image I started looking around to see what I have. I saw this old 2 inch lens from a 16 mm movie projector sitting on my shelf and I got to thinking what would happen if I pointed a light source through it, what would happen? So I took it along with my Quantas Koala photographer figurine to the studio to experiment. Placing the Koala on a white piece of foam core I then preceded to clamp the 2 inch lens in place using a magic arm on a stand. Next I set my Canon 7D and 24-70 f2.8 lens on the tripod with the cable release and framed up my subject. I then went and retrieved a small LED flashlight that I received from Canon at their booth at PhotoPlus in New York last fall. It has nine little LED's in it and gives a nice light. Having worked with small flashlights in the past I figured the exposure would be around 1/40 sec at f5.6 @ 1600 ISO. Projecting the flashlight through the projector lens gave this wonderful light pattern and after the first exposure I adjusted my settings to 1/60th at f7.1. I played with the patterns created thus the three images. I like the top image the best as it looks like a flower. However I also did like the more theatrical lighting look created on the two images below. The different patterns were cast by moving the flashlight closer and farther from the projector lens thus changing the sharpness. After taking the images I brought the files into photoshop. Now not knowing what the white balance of the LED's would be I choose to shoot at the daylight setting (roughly 5500K). However this was to blue when I opened the raw files so I adjusted the balance up to 7700K to clean up the whites a bit more. It was fun to experiment, and I would be interested in hearing which of the three you prefer.

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