Grass Roots Video

I again wanted to take a picture using flash, but I also wanted to only use one flash to accomplish something that usually requires at least 2 flashes if not more.  I decided on a faux catalog shoot of a tiki statue that had belonged to my wife’s grandmother.  She acquired it on a vacation to Hawaii in the 1950’s or 1960’s.  And it appears to be a hand carved out of real wood – as opposed to cast from plastic as are his buddies down in our Tiki Bar. 

So I took out the scrap paper from a large background roll that I had cut down.  It’s about 2 feet wide and several yards long.  I draped it over the kitchen table and taped it to the wall.  No background stand needed.  then I placed the camera on the tripod, made sure my vertical on the camera was the same as Mr. Tiki’s (lest he appear intoxicated), and fired away with one flash on camera. 

It worked pretty well except for there was a dicernable shadow falling behind and to camera left of Mr. Tiki.  I’m sure for most purposes this would be fine, but I wanted that floating in limbo look.  So back to the camera bag.

I got my TTL cord so that the flash could be moved off camera and still be controlled by the camera.  I then held the flash in position right behind the lens and bounced the flash off the ceiling.  Perfect!!… except now the recesses in the carving went too dark and were filled with shadow.  So back to the camera bag.

This time I got one of my Honl bounce cards and placed it on the flash to throw some light straight forward while the majority of the light still shot up to the ceiling.  BINGO!  I now had the shot I was looking for, constructed in about 10 minutes with only one flash.

Now I do have to admit that I did edit the pic at the top of this post with Photoshop.  But it was literally a 1-click edit.  To even out the slight tonal variations in the white background caused by not completely clearing off the kitchen table before shooting, I filled in the background with one solid color of white.  Here’s the original for comparison.

As always please feel free to comment on the pictures and to offer your sugestions for tomorrows pic.  Constructive criticism is always welcome.