I spent the last two days experimenting with my new strobes (see the last post). I chose my baby grand as a subject. The gallery below shows some of the results.
This large, complex object presents endless opportunities for interesting photos. There are a surprisingly large assortment of textures, colors, and interesting reflective surfaces, both inside and out. The few shots above only scratch the surface (well, hopefully no surfaces were scratched, really), although I did spend a fair amount of time tuning and tweaking the camera angle and the light to get just the effects I was looking for.
The first one is obviously inside the piano. I spent some effort trying to get the light to reflect off the highest point in the band of strings, right where they touch the red felt. This, along with the red itself, makes them pop out a bit. Otherwise, the image is quite flat.
As you can see with Strings 1 and 2, both of which were done with a single strobe and an umbrella, but without moving the camera, simply moving the light produced a dramatic change in the result. The second image has less apparent depth than the first, although I do think both are interesting.
With the keys, I included three similar shots to show how changing the camera angle just a little gives each image its own feel. The first gives a sense to me that everything will slide down to the left. The second feels relatively even (even though the lines really are not vertical), and the last looks like a ladder to climb. I guess the middle one is the standard angle I would use to represent keyboard keys, but the others are interesting in their own way. In all cases, I made a point to have pools of reflected light on the white keys, without which, the image is very dull.
For the last shot of the keys from an odd angle with a wide lens, I lit evenly from the side, and then shot the second strobe almost directly at the camera from slightly above, and slightly to the side, to get the stream of light down the black keys at a slight angle. Again, without the splash of light, the image becomes less interesting.
Let me know what you think. More to come.