Photography for a Rainy Day.

If your anything like me then you will be wanting to take pictures all the time, if so then you don't want to let rain put a stop to your creativity. On a rainy day you will find me trawling through 'youtube' looking for ideas for great photo ops that can be achieved indoors, and I'm pleased to say there are literally hundreds.

This particular idea is stolen from Bryan Peterson, I am a subscriber to his 'youtube' channel and I find his videos fantastic, full of ideas and information not to mention double helpings of American cheese to go with it. In this video Bryan has his own motives behind the shoot but I have simply applied the English weather theory instead of Mr Peterson's earth saving one.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCYG7HO_SZo&feature=related

Here is my set up for the shoot:





Its all very simple, fill a shallow dish with warm water add a tiny bit of vegetable or any clear oil, suspend the dish roughly 10cm from a colourful backdrop (in my case an Xbox game case) remember to move the background after each shot to give you endless colour and shape possibilities. Shoot with a large aperture to give reasonable depth of field i.e f/8 or below, this will ensure that the background is out of focus as it is only the colour that we need. I added some flash with a red gel to spice things up a little - this is optional though. Also if you do not have a macro lens you can use close up filters or a 50mm f/1.8 for example this should work just fine.

Its all about colour and shape which is what photographers look for everywhere they go.

Questions and/or comments below.

Its definitely time for another post on the blog, another photo for a wall only this time its not ours but my mother in laws.

This is the flower we brought her for mothers day and thought it would be a great idea to give her a print of it for her birthday.

So a quick easy picture was in order, as it happens quite often, I had a picture in my mind already of how I wanted the image to look, I knew I wanted a dark black background, I wanted the picture to be taken full length and shot side on (i.e. not looking down on the flower head for example)

I started by rolling down our bedroom blind over our washing basket and placed the flower on it. I set up a tripod and camera with a cable release and chose to use a 60mm Macro lens (mainly for its sharpness) I then got out a flash and held it with one hand with the cable release in the other making it easier to move the flash around the subject, above, below, in-front and behind checking the LCD screen each time to make sure I was getting the exposure correct ect, it was a very crude set up but it worked.

THIS image should give you a better idea of the set up....





This was one of those times where you get everything set up, dial in the flash power and aperture ect and take the first picture and smile to yourself because the first frame is exactly what you had in your head, I do love it when that happens :)

The exposure was f/11, flash power set to 1/8th from memory. My one and only snag was that the light from the flash was occasionally hitting the background which was actually a dark blue so this was spoiling my black background look, so a quick fix was to put together a make-shift flag out of card and put in on the side of my flash then secure it with an elastic band, this worked a treat and kept the light from straying onto my home-made backdrop and kept everything black.

In photoshop it was just a matter of cleaning up a few stray leaves at the bottom of the image using the paint brush tool and zooming to check detail.

Quick, easy and, I think effective.

As all ways any questions or comments stick em below.