Metal and Glass

For the first setup we mounted the handgun to a table so it was standing up like someone was shooting it. We lit the gun by placing a medium softbox overhead, and a strip softbox underneath. I placed the softboxes in these positions so I could get lines of light all the way down the gun. We set a snoot up coming from behind to backlight and define the smoke. The smoke was made by lighting a small piece of paper on fire and pushing it into the barrel. The resulting smoke would allow for an average of three frames before it went out. The shutter speed was set to 250, and the aperature was set to f/11 and then auto-bracketing was used to shoot at a stop over and under f/11. I liked how the photos came out from this setup, and I ended up choosing one of them for my select. It was hard to choose between one that had a lot of smoke in it, and one that had only a subtle amount of it. I ended up choosing the one with less smoke because it was more realistic. Also, in this shoot I had a problem with halation in the first set of images from the snoot. This problem was overcome by changing the angle of the snoot.



In the second setup, because the handgun is an old police issue revolver I wanted to go for a kind police like setup. To start I went over to the campus maintenance place and borrowed a piece of quarter-inch steel plating for a nice background texture. I also purchased a red and a blue gel. After polishing the bullets as best I could and wearing gloves so I wouldn’t get fingerprints I arranged the setup. We put two softboxes at 45 degree angles on the sides for the lighting. Both softboxes were given an equal amount of power and a red gel was placed on the right softbox. We experimented with both red and blue (for a siren effect) but it was too much. I liked what came out of this setup, but not as much as the first one.

Studio Portrait

I set up one head with 1200 Ws and the big white diffuser disk. I placed the head at about 45 degrees on both axes. I was shooting at 1/250 and f 16 and 100 ISO. I think that I should have used less power in the head because I had plenty of light to work with and it may have been more comfortable to my subject. I liked how the images from this setup came out, although I feel like a lot of them look like mugshots. I still am not comfortable with being in control of what the subject does.




For my multiple-light setup I tried to be more creative. I first set a head with 800 Ws on a floor stand and pointed it through the back of a chair. I wanted to get the shadows from the chair to give the background some depth. I then took a reading on the background and found that the correct exposure for it was 1/200 at f8. After knowing what exposure I wanted on the background I set up the other lights (by distance to subject) to correspond to the background exposure. I placed the key light (1200 Ws) in a large softbox and put it on the left side of the subject at around 60 degrees. I set a reflector at about the same place on the right side of the subject for fill light. I then put a 200 Ws head in a snoot and aimed it at the back of the subject’s head from behind for a hairlight. I think the setup worked almost how I wanted it to, except I had problems with making the hair light show up. I think I might have needed to make it brighter, or bring the subject out further from the background to get a better angle. I chose this image for my selects.