Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Intro to Still Life

A 4x5 view camera is one of the most commonly used formats in still life photography. In class we did a demo and took this polaroid of pair of sunglasses.



Remember when chooing your 4x5 lenses that the mm don't correspond to those on your 35mm lenses. Here is a conversion chart. We used a 210 lens, which is about the same as using a 60mm lens on your 35mm camera.



To practice a product/advertising shot, we also photographed some Chanel lipstick. Once using a plexi sweep lit from above and below, and once using natural light and reflector.


In this shot, we placed the lipstick on a plexi sweep and put a strobe below and a softbox above. Notice how there are no shadows around the bottom edges of the lipstick case. A long lens (over 100mm) was used at F11. Notice that everything in the frame is in focus because of this.




In this shot we placed the lipstick on a sheet of white paper, right next to a big window. The window lit the subject from the side and a reflector filled in the shadows. A macro lens was used at F4, creating just a small plane to be in focus, highlighting the "chanel" stamp on the lipstick. Notice that small shadows have been cast to the side of the tube, because it sits on paper and is not lit from below like the above image.

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