Month: February 2013

I didn’t plan to photograph wine glasses again today, but I decided to play with diffused backlighting and after I set up my diffuser in the bay window and placed a bouquet of flowers in front of it, I started thinking about how a wine glass would look with a white diffused background instead of a black background and what if I used more light from the sides than just the window light? Out came the OTT lights again, this time with vellum diffusers taped over the light bulbs. The problem was that the diffuser is one color of white and the paper on which I set the wine glass was another color of white; since white is the presence of all colors apparently some whites are more colorful than others. Disappointed in my results, I decided to try a black background and placed a thin strip of black velvet atop the diffuser. I took a few shots with the black background. Once again, the colorful reflections that I always seem not to notice were prevalent but thanks to a black and white conversion, those reflections are toned down. And, thanks to black and white conversion, the wine glass on the white background looked better to me, too.

I took both shots at f/16 and ISO 100. The white glass needed 1/4 second shutter speed and the black 4/5 of a second and the focal lengths were slightly different due to my fiddling with placement. I still prefer the black background. And, these are photos of different wine glasses. When I placed the wine glass on the black background, I realized that the hard water spots show up on the black; the first time I took a photo of this wine glass almost a year ago, it was brand new and pristine. Luckily, and thanks to Costco, I have a dozen (minus one that was shattered to smithereens some months ago) so I had a pristine one waiting in the wings. The spots don’t show up on white but they sure look bad on black.

While Bobo explored the kitchen table this afternoon, I set up my tripod, set a reflector on a kitchen chair behind my camera bag, and placed one of my OTT lights on the table. None of these things deterred Bobo and with each addition, she got more curious. She spent most of her time looking down into my camera bag but she was also curious about the silver reflector and she beaked the base of the OTT light. When I shoved the camera lens just a few inches away, she wasn’t deterred nor did she act afraid as she usually does with anything she doesn’t know intimately. As I played with the shots I took, I realized that most were not in great focus because, despite the use of the tripod, Bobo was in almost constant motion and while the background was in crisp focus, my subject wasn’t.

The closeup of her incredibly ugly Zygodactyl feet (that means two toes facing front and two toes facing back) was in focus because she stood still long enough. As I examined this shot, I couldn’t help but think that the only thing uglier than her feet is a tomato horn worm, a creature to which Bobo’s feet bear a very strong resemblance. Then I got to thinking about the other parts of her that are pretty ugly as well. While Bobo’s feathers are vibrantly colored and beautiful many parts of her are rather odd. Her beak is constantly flaking off and it is chipped and ragged. It is attached suspiciously at the underside possibly with skin but there is a crater at the bottom, I suspect to allow her beak to open wide. And the white, featherless skin around her eyes is wrinkly and just plain weird looking. It is incredibly soft, however, despite its appearance. When Bobo is in the mood to allow me the privilege of scratching her head, she lets me rub her eyelids too, and that area is the smoothest skin I’ve ever felt.

My intention was to create a collage of several of the shots I took today, showing Bobo’s various weird parts. But as I created the collage, I couldn’t get an arrangement that showed what I wanted to feature. That is until I placed the foot shot. For some reason it became huge and I realized that placing the eye and the beak made the creation very Picasso-esque. Out with the extra shots. Just these three make a Picasso Bobo.

This age old question is a conundrum of sorts: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I think I’m the side of the “egg” coming first but how the hell did it get here? I took a few shots of an egg this morning before I cracked it into a bowl and scrambled it for breakfast so in the long run, just so long as there is an egg to eat every once in a while, and a chicken, too, for that matter, I don’t really care which came first.

I had trouble with the lens focusing properly because I was putting the lens too close to the subject so the shots with the more interesting lighting didn’t measure up to my “in focus” requirements for the blog. This shot had the best focus of the shots I took, but I was disappointed that the lower shadow doesn’t appear in its entirety in the shot.