POTD 12/5 2010

Another from my tulip shot yesterday. There's just something about my 60mm lens - it creates a far larger proportion of keepers than my other lenses.



Again done "in situ" with onboard flash bounced off a small foldable bounce.

POTD 11/5 2010

After a long absence, mostly due to me not shooting anything that I could put here (for reasons of quality and permissions), POTD is back with a sample from todays tulip shoot:



This is the result of the contorted setup shown in the previous post. Of course, I could have snipped the whole thing off and taken it inside for a studio shot, but I don't like to do that. Never the easy way for me... Besides, it would probably have caused a goodly amount of the dust to fall off.

What the picture of the setup doesn't show is how I light it: I bounce the flash right into my little fold-out bounce, using the white side. This gives a large enough lit area compared to the tiny subject that the light is appropriately rounded without being flat, and makes the details stand out clearly. Again, not the easiest way, particularly because the flash has a limited rotation ability. I look forward to having my own studio some day.

Moving the light a little bit around to illuminate the front of the left stem might have made it nicer, or it might have cut the drama down. I really like the yellow-on-deep-purple effect it has right now, it's one of my favorite color combinations.

I heart my tripod (mostly)

As previously posted, I got a new tripod (Induro AX-214) to replace the too-long Manfrotto. While I haven't been able to go out and use it as much as one would hope for (having a sick wife meant having to pick up extra household chores), I'm giving it a work-out these days. I particularly like the ability to angle the center column. Here is todays setup:



In case it's hard to see, I'm shooting the petal-less tulip that's in front of the camera. I need to be pretty much parallel with the stem, hence the contortions.

I would have been hard-pressed to get this setup without serious damage to the other flowers, if at all. Other situations would simple have been impossible, such as placing the camera right next to a wall. I'm never getting another tripod without this feature.

The downside is that it takes a lot of turning on the two knobs on the column to get them to hold fast. There is no click or other indication of when it's fastened, the best you can do is tighten it a lot and re-check that it doesn't move. If you've been carefully positioning the camera in a cumbersome position, this can be a real bother. But part of it may just be that I should get used to placing the tripod in a place where I don't have to crawl over the tripod to get to the camera.