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.