Metallic still lives


This time I have a completely different shoot to show you. My main subject of photography is portraits of people. And of course, that will remain that way.

However, I sometimes also enjoy to do still life and product shoots in the studio. The main reason for that is the technical aspect of it. Most of the time, these kind of shots require a deeper technical lighting scheme. Which is something I like too. Beside the technique behind it, creating these shoots progress in a quiet pace. No rush. Completely different then shooting portraits in which you, as a photographer, always work together with people. When you work with people, you need to keep an eye on planning, results, feelings and so on. That pressure is something good which I like most of the time. But sometimes I like to work quiet.

The technical aspect of creating these kind of still life images adds to my knowledge and skill set as a photographer. And on their turn, these skills can be used for portrait work. And that makes the circle back around again.

So in the future you can expect some more of these kind of photographs as well.

This time I decided to use metal objects only. And light them with a blueish color which adds to the cold feel of the metal. To create a powerful contrast I used red light as an effect light.

Here are some results of the shoot:

As far as the lighting goes. This is a bit more complex. Not in the amount of flashes. I used studio strobes by the way. It is more complex in the way I used these strobes. This light is all indirect light. I used strobes with a standard reflector which each had a color gel on it. On one of these reflectors I used barn doors to flag off some light. Both strobes were bounced of a white piece of polystyrene. Normally I would use a soft box for the blue main light but that was not an option for this shoot because I didn’t have such large gels to fit in the soft box. So created a kind of softer light by bouncing of that polystyrene plate. Not ideal but at least a lot better than direct light. In one shot I added an extra small strobe to create a magenta color effect.