High-Key Lighting (self-portrait)

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Humbly speaking, I was amazed by how the pictures turned out and very pleased by how the colors reflected on the water and the clarity of the pictures. I already have ideas of things I will do next time to get better results but that’s just part of the learning process.  For those of you thinking “how boring can photographing a drop of water must be”, let me tell you I never thought doing this would be so much fun and interesting.  We certainly can’t appreciate what happens when a drop hits a surface because of the speed at which it occurs, but once we’re able to freeze the moment we start appreciating the physics behind drops, tension, momentum, kinetic energy, sound and all those things some of us studied in college but never look at again.

For this attempt I used two strobes positioned left and right of the camera with different colored gels. Here are some of the pictures. (Note: There is no Photoshop involved here, I only use a batch process to add the copyright stamp, other than that what you see is what I got straight from the camera):

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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.

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If you wonder how was I able to get a model so quick. Well, that’s my beautiful wife and victim of many of my experiments.

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