My "Surrealism" entry, which not surprisingly (and deservedly) finished in the middle of the pack, was a last-minute shot, and the motivation had nothing to do with the challenge per se. Let me explain:
I frequently see threads in here where people go on and on about this light over that light, softboxes, diffusers, strobes, hot lights, light tents, whatever,,, And I been there, I done that, for 25 years, with a full-tilt-boogie professional studio of 2,500 square feat, cyclorama and all. Hell, we even shot cars in there... But it doesn't interest me anymore. I'm a natural light kind of guy. So, thinking of Rene magritte's "This is Not a Pipe" image, one of the iconic images of surrealism, I decided to take my own pipe, which coincidentally is a bear, and make a "surreal" image of it in "studio-natural" light.
Presumably everyone will pretty well agree this is nicely lit and modeled? The thing of it is, the ONLY light is from a north skylight above my kitchen island. The backdrop is a black, ballistic-cloth portfolio propped up a foot behind the setup. That's it. White balance set at "cloudy". Essentially zero post-processing, a slight nudge up on yellow saturation. Very slight. Minuscule, even. And some USM after resizing.
Simple and effective. It's perfectly possible to do clean, craftsmanlike setups without a lot of lighting equipment. Window walls out of direct sunlight, especially north windows, work very nicely too. This is the kind of lighting the Old Masters used a lot of the time, and we can too...
Robt.
Message edited by author 2005-03-16 02:02:11.
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