It’s been a relatively pleasant week since Tuesday – I’ve spent most of the time Not Cleaning, Not Sweeping Leaves and Not Weeding, which is always nice.
I’ve probably been ODing on Civilization too – I’ve spent abput 24 hours on a game on my own this week, and also played a game with Emma until 2:30 in the morning last night, and continued it for another four hours or so today. She recently got ADSL, which makes playing over the net quite a bit easier – before that on the one time we’d attempted a multiplayer game over the net there was quite a painful delay between clicking the mouse or pressing a key and anything actually happening.
All that Civ playing has taken its toll though – I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been trampled over by a stampede of Oliphants. You wouldn’t think playing a strategy game would hurt – but the tendency to stare unblinking, unmoving at the screen for the duration of the session causes more than a few seized up muscles…heh.
Apart from that, I spent the rest of the weekend taking photos of my various dragons and other things that I have scattered around the house for the purpose of letting people who tend to buy them for me know what I already have, as well as providing the oportunity to show them off a bit ;)
That was quite an interesting excersize – experimenting with lighting and stuff to try to get the best results.
Originally I experimented with draping some black cloth I had lying around over the small CD rack on one of my desks, and putting the dragons in front of that.
That worked OK for the first one I tried, but for most of them it was too short – to avoid a noticeable shadow behind the subject, I needed to have it quite far forward from the backdrop, but that meant that you could see the wall behind.
So I ended up draping a queen sized black bedsheet over the front of the desk and on to the floor, and that seemed to provide enough height.
I also then wrapped a stack of CDs in the black cloth I’d used in my first attempts and used that as a platform for the subjects. With the addition of a bendy standing reading light, a desk lamp, and a tiny tripod that Emma had given me because she never used it, I completed my make-shift studio.
For most of them, I used the flash, as that would usually illuminate the subject enough that the backround completely disappeared to black – which was the effect I was looking for.
However, the flash on my camera is very bright, and in some cases was way too much – so for a few I had to experiment with using no flash, or using the flash in fill mode (which is when it opens the shutter – flashes, then holds the shutter open for a while longer to let the ambient light have a chance to make an impact).
Here’s a sample of what the three different ways look like –
| Flash | Fill Flash | No Flash |
|---|---|---|
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It took quite a lot of time all up, and resulted in the taking of easily 200 photos – for one item I took 30 photos to get it right, although that was fairly extreme. It was the hanging tealight candle holder I got for my birthday and I was trying to photograph it with the candle lit. So as well as trying to make the subject itself look good, and attempting to drop out as much background as possible, I was also trying to emphasize the light from the candle.
Most only required one or two photos especially the ones that were all very similar – once I’d got it right for one, I could just swap in the next, take the photo and move on.
Anyway…it was all rather satisfying, and you can view the results here.
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