Simple Lighting, Simple Post

The other day I was casually strolling around my house picking up various items I thought were intriguing and putting them into a small box. Afterwards I took the box of stuff I had collected and headed down to my basement and tossed up a quick (and I do mean quick) lighting setup to photograph some of them. I hadn't photographed anything in nature without a model involved in a long time, and since I had some extra time between assignments, I thought, "Why not?"

Nature is simple to photograph, simply because it's just there. I didn't want to do anything complicated, either, since I was basically taking a break from my other work and I wanted to relax a bit. (I do find creating photographs to be more relaxing than sitting in a recliner sipping a cold one, btw.)

So here's the lighting setup:



A simple wooden frame to clamp things onto
A sheet of silver poster-paper
A single energy-saving florescent light bulb with clamp
The white sheet in the background is only there to cover up all my stuff laying around in my basement.

I set the items one by one onto the silver paper, set my camera to Aperture Priority, dialed in F5.6, set my ISO to 800 and fired away. (The white balance on my camera was set to florescent to account for the light's temperature.) After collecting a good number of shots, I desaturated the images a bit and cropped them according to taste. Here are the results:







That's about it. Simple stuff, simple setup. The whole process from collecting the images, setting up the lighting, creating the photographs, and then editing them took about 1 hour. So if you have a spare hour in your day and you're not sure what to do with it, you can productively create some simple yet interesting photographs of things found just outside your bedroom window.

Cheers,
JoeyB

(I'm actually so happy with the results of my return to utter simplicity that I now feel compelled to print, frame, and display the images somewhere nice.)