Happiness is a working internet connection and being able to send emails with attachments without wishing to burn down Optus for being absolutely useless. If another one of their help desk recommend that I switch on and off the modem as the only solution I’m not sure what I will do. In order to avoid madness I have signed up for another lighting course with ACP, this one a specialist course on lighting up shiny, blingy object. The tutor for this is again Greg Parsons, and mucking around with a dozen lights and his wide format camera kept me sane in the past few weeks. The shot above is an example of a set up from a previous week taking 3 hours to compose and lit. There were three light sources in the shot, the main one being a large light diffused with a screen from the back. Another light was used from the back to lit the side of the bottle to give it shape, a third one on the right to lit the glass. Other tricks of the trade being a silver card placed behind the bottle to give colour to the otherwise dense black glass.
One thing I am getting out of the course so far is in order to light reflective surfaces, it is about angling and wrapping the light rather than shining the light directly on to the object. Reflectors are useful, and diffuse light shapes the object breaking it away from the background. If you are interested in taking a course, I would recommend the ACP as a good starting point. They do recommend their students to take Camera Craft 1 and 2 before doing a lighting course, but this can be waived depending on your experience with a camera. Greg is taking a food photography course which I would have jumped on to enroll, but I’m not sure I will be around for more than a week or two unfortunately…
mirgraphy 