Photographing a piece of paper
[UPDATE: 04/22/2009]
I have added link to the full size images since I noticed the quality looks pretty bad on some monitors because the images are reduced to fit in the blog.
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Last night I received a certificate from Adobe stating that I’m now an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in Advanced ColdFusion 8. Well great news for me but why do I mention that in my photoblog? Well considering the importance of the certificate I wanted to have an electronic copy of it. I also wanted to post it on my Tech blog as I don’t really have an assigned office so, the certificate will probably be in a drawer for sometime whithout getting seeing by anyone.
This reminded me of a post I saw once at the Strobist about photographing a historic piece of paper. I couldn’t find the post (if anyone knows the link please post it in the comments) but he explained how he gave the paper picture a 3D (more realistic) look instead of having a flat looking one. So, what a great opportunity to put that technique to test.
First the photo with on-camera flash, diffuser on, cranked down to about 1/32 and pointing directly to the paper:
Flash on-camera
On-camera flash Zoomed in
Now the picture with off-camera flash, laying flat on the table pointing towards the side of the paper. I can’t remember the flash power but it was somewhere between 1/16 – 1/32. The faded bar is part of the certificate’ design:
Off Camera flash laying down on table
Off-camera flash Zoomed in
Now, that’s some nice paper texture! The first one looks more like a scanned image (flat) and the off-camera flash looks more real. One more example of the many advantages of using off-camera flashes.
