I’m supposed to be working on this big project for my photography class. The basis of it is experimental lighting to enhance a photograph. I have done some quick and dirty examples of how doing some simple changes to your lighting and camera setting, you can turn a shitty picture into a great picture.
The first example is using a high aperture (f-22) along with a super bright light (650 watt) to light a scene versus using an automatic setting on a camera such as my Nikon D80. First the auto setting shot.
All and all, it isn’t such a bad picture. The problems are getting true whites and true blacks as you can see in the shot coming below.
Obviously better whites and blacks here. Also, I manually set the white balance as opposed to the camera deciding what was white.
This next set is much more obvious. I took a picture of my mother’s Aggie class ring on a mirror, a blush compact mirror at that. With this shot I compared again, a 650 watt tungsten Arri light with the built in flash on my camera. I again modified the f-stop to 22 on my manual shot.
As you can see, the flash blew out the color of the gold and the lower f-stop picked up all the light hitting the mirror. It’s a plain old gross picture. However, let’s see what happens when we set the aperture to f-22, pound the thing with 650 watts of light.
I swear, it’s like magic. The silver mirror turns to black and the gold, which was previously washed to a pale yellow, is now a deep, rich 14ct gold. Look at that reflection!
These pictures are just the foundation of my project, showing how small changes in light can totally change a picture. I intend to include emotive portraits and many other genres of photography in this series. Here’s to hoping I can make it happen and make it something special, unique and captivating.
Tags:
Aggie,
Arri,
Class,
Family,
Light,
Macro,
Mom,
Nikon,
Photography,
Project,
Ring,
School,
Scraps,
Spoon,
Strobe 
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