Action!

As I post here, I hope to share knowledge that I stumble upon as a photographer for others to use. I’ve been greatly helped out by fellow bloggers such as David Hobby from Strobist and the good people over at Flash Flavor. If you want to see some great photography and learn your craft a little more, I’d encourage you to check those fellows out.

This weekend, I wanted to play with an idea of how to light rings so that they look great and sparkle nicely. I had an idea for a reflector that might help pull a little more of the fire out of my lady’s “best friend.”
I started with the idea that I’d backlight the right with a bare flash. Raking the light accross the wicker to get the texture. That’s what you see with this first shot.
Now here we have the light bounce back into the ring. It lights it up nicely and fills in the shadow and all things considered is a fairly nice shot. But I’m not really digging the highlights that the backlighting is creating. They seem to compete for attention with the ring itself. So….

I moved my light to the right of the rings and just like a warning shot, I fired the flash over the heads of the rings. You can see just how little light is hitting the rings in “rings-3.” All that was left for me to do was to grab my handy dandy reflector and use it to bounce the light down onto the rings. I tried a couple angles and distances and this last one was my favorite.

Now here’s the fun part: The idea behind this project was to get a reflector that would help chop up the hard single source of a flash and turn it into several smaller, more varied points of light that the diamond could catch and reflect back. I had considered building a flash attachment or customizing a ring flash and then I realized that I was overthinking the whole thing. Here’s the “Magical Reflector” that I built. It took about 35 seconds and a screwdriver to kill off this poor pie tin. If you’d like me to build you one… It’ll cost you $10 or $6.95 if Marie Callendar’s is having a sale. I promise to send it right over… just as soon as I finish the last slice. YUM!