Submission:Table Top

Well. I really enjoyed doing this assignment - it was good to have a deadline again. As I said in my previous comments I had loads of ideas, and I have taken around 100 frames of around 5 different ideas. This was my final idea, and I was happy with this as it was mine, the other ones I'd got by looking around the web for some inspiration. Three bottles on a black ash tabletop. Took about 15 shots to get this as I was using one flash to illuminate the bottles while trying to get a reflection on the table of the bottles as well as get the specular highlight in the right place behind them. Really happy with the final shot with the exception of the cup ring on the table which I only saw once I had this picture on the screen.
Some other ideas I had are on my flickr stream.

Blue...

I had four ideas for this. I took pictures for three of them, one I waited all day to get - but the conditions I wanted did not arise. Finally I tried this one, which is the best out of all my ideas I think. Took 40 pictures today - this was about 38...

Submission: Coffee

And here's mine. I started off with just a trail of beans, but decided that I wanted a bit more context, so used this grinder, which I thought had an interesting shape.

Submission: Coffee

Heres my weekend offering. I had 3 shots in mind, the first I couldn't get the composition right, the second was the above, and the third one I never got around to taking.
Took me quite a while to get the lighting right on this one above, I went and bought shiny beans, but then this was about the 9th shot. Decided to go tight in. had to put way more light into this that I thought at first. The coffee was in a tupperware box, and I had a flashgun to the side which diffused nicely through the side of the box. But I had to ramp up the light to get the exposure right. As soon as I saw this shot in the preview I knew it was right, as it had way more colour than the others. Gave me a bad back though as I had to hand hold it.
Thought I better get this uploaded in case you had done a bean shot as well :p

Submission#2: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

But I thought I's surprise you with another entry. I did this as a test shot on Friday night. You see I spent most of Friday night doing some video editing, so this was one of my activities. Interesting thing is that it was still light when I did it. I stopped down so that I could just about make out the back of the mac, then I put a off camera flash on the keyboard pointing up at me. First attempt was way too bright, so I put a page from a reporters notebook curved over the flash head. Hence this picture. Really pleased with it as I've been wanting to do one of these for ages - pity it makes me look so old..

Submission: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

Well here was my exciting weekend - this is the 5 minutes when I wasn't sneezing. Wanted to get the front of the mower in focus and then blurr backwards. Camera position was difficult, so used the beanbag effect on the bottom of a lap-tray. Then took ages trying to get the sun to blow the sky without leaving lens flare. The action part was the blade of grass desparately trying to get away from the blades...

I also used mirrors to take the image, but found it a lot more difficult than I first imagined. Trying to the camera reflected in the mirrors took a lot of tweaking, but I wanted to get the camera from more than one angle. The white balance is also out, but since I have only had the camera a week, I have yet to master that. Did find where the self-timer was though!!

Mirror Mirror on the wall

I had trouble with the colour balance using the house lights, ended up using the flash - and what I didnt show in the setup was me holding the posterboard up behind it.

I had to tweak the levels as well - In the end I just bounced the flash in from the ceiling and didnt set the exposure - hence the levels tweak. Ran out of time in the end.

Also I was getting some double reflections from the cheap mirrors (or angle of lighting) i was using.
And here is the setup: