“I want to try and photograph a glass properly.”
“Why?”
“What the hell else do I have to do while waiting to die?”
This was the essence of the conversation I had with my wife after I had spent several hours messing about with glasses and my camera. So far, the score was: Glasses 2 - Camera 0; assuming you were scoring based on breakages; but they were just some old, rather valuable, cut-glass sherry glasses that my granny used to own, so nothing to get too concerned about. My wife was more concerned about the hours of fiddling, what was the point?
It all started with a photo in a forum. Just a couple of glasses, but the capture was perfect. They were delicately outlined, there were no stray reflections, they looked fantastic. The poster referred to a book that had guided him to the result: Light:Science and Magic. A quick trip to the Amazon Kindle store and the book was on my iPad.
The book explains the science of light in the context of photography and it is a fine, if somewhat dense, read. After a couple of chapters of theory I skipped to the section on photographing glasses and was ready to begin. At the same time, neighbour Nik had also acquired the book, had skipped to the same section, and a joint exercise was undertaken.
I won’t bore you with the details (yeah, I know, it’s too late), but the concept is that your light source comes from behind the glass and goes through (or around, if you want a dark background) an opening that exactly matches what you see through your viewfinder. As a result, and based upon clever, scientific theory which I don’t recall because I either skipped it, forgot it, or didn’t understand it; the light passes cleanly through the glass to your camera sensor and gives you a crisp outline.
Great in theory, understood or not, but not so great in practice because in reality there is light bouncing off the glass from all manner of other light sources in a room. So our first effort looked like this:
Quite crispy from a distance, but look closer and you can see all sorts of reflections which should not be there. We spent more than hour removing pictures from the wall, opening and closing curtains and moving furniture; all to no avail; there was just too much light bouncing around the place.
But now, courtesy of even more shitty clothing display hangers and the entire stock of black plastic sheets from Friendship Supermarket, I have this:
Mr. Heath Robinson would have been proud.
Notice the clever vents to allow only small amounts of light to penetrate whilst allowing space for a cat to escape after it has infiltrated the structure and increased the lead of glasses over camera to 3-0. The bit of tape that holds on the “roof”, until it doesn’t and the roof comes crashing down. 4-0. The complete absence of anything that might be construed as design. Damn, I am good at this sort of thing.
An initial test with some of the few remaining pieces of glassware was quite encouraging.
The clever science explains that the further away the object is from the light source, the more distinct will be the outline. I felt that the outline on the right of the glass had passed through distinct and was now intrusive; so I moved the glasses back towards the light.
Now the outline was a little fuzzy; presumably somewhere between the two locations was a sweet spot.
I was not to find out, because she who must be obeyed suggested that if I didn’t get my head out of my miniature plastic shanty house and take her for some crucial shopping, I would not have long to wait before death visited me.
Sadly for you, to be continued.
Comments 🔗
2011-03-09| Billy the Brush sayserm, excuse me, but shouldn’t this be in the “Photography” tab? …
2011-03-09| genuinej saysSadly indeed. Bring back the levitating horses, the cats, Khun Honda etc., etc.
2011-03-10| Spike saysBilly, It is tagged under photography- general. If you stuck to the “life” tag as advised, you would never have seen this.
genuinej, be careful what you wish for, there is another polo tournament next week.
2011-03-10| Barry saysExcuse me, Spike old chap. When one logs on to the site it is usually to the Home page, not Life. So we are automatically tormented with your ramblings about trying to photograph glasses.
And now that wife’s little sister is back, can we have some snaps of her with the cats so we can all go ‘Ahhh!’ Maybe with some non-reflecting glasses in the background. And maybe some snaps of all the glasses you’ve broken, tastefully arranged. It could be seen as symbolic of something. Or not.
2011-03-10| Spike saysBarry, my dear fellow, by “logs on” I assume you mean click on a bookmark you have established in the category “Assorted stuff, not porn, to look at when I really have nothing else to do”. Just change the link to http://www.pattayadays.com/category/life/ and you need never again read anything camera/photography tech related.
Girl/cat/broken glass ensemble to follow shortly.