Shooting skills of still life glass

Lead: It is often said that the original meaning of "photography" is "painting with light", which means "painting with light". The so-called "painting" means that the painter can decide to "paint" anywhere on the canvas, where it is black and where it is white, all by the painter's hands. So when taking pictures, if we just "press the shutter where there is light", where is it like "painting"?

There are many examples of still life glass shooting skills to illustrate the difference between "light as lighting" and "consciously controlling light" in image presentation, and I first felt this difference when shooting "glass" homework at school. Glass itself is transparent, and the surface will reflect light and refract light, so there will be many light problems in shooting, but because of these problems, it is easy for photographers to have the inspiration of "light painting", so shooting glass can probably be regarded as the only way for photographers to practice! ?

Let's see how to change the visual appearance of glass by controlling the light!

Equipment information

Camera Olympus E-PL 1+ Nikon 50mm f1.41125f1

Shed lamp Elinchrom D-lite 4 it

Prop glass

The first is to put the glass in front of the white wall, and the shooting platform is a glass desktop. The camera has a good angle, so shoot it. We didn't do any lighting control here.

It's so dark ~ mm-hmm (think about it), it should be the problem of "exposure compensation", because it's a white wall, and everyone knows that "white increases and black decreases"! Ok, let's take another picture!

It looks brighter, yes, but why is it still ugly?

Well, this is the bag that photographers may take out when they have no feeling about the control of light. Of course, you may be lucky. The glass is put in a place that suits her very well and makes you fall for it. But as a photographer, how can you be fooled by taking pictures? !

The first thing to do next is to eliminate the "stray light" that should not exist, that is, "turn off all ambient light sources", and use a shed lamp+soft light cover to brighten the background to form a simple backlight.

Do you understand what this is all about?

Wow! It's really much better than just now! At least those ugly reflections on the glass have disappeared, but? The edge of the glass doesn't seem so clear? So the next thing to do is to "draw" edges on both sides of the glass.

In fact, the practice is to add two blackboards at the left and right rear of the glass.

This is the left and right edges of the "painted" glass, but it seems that the black edges on both sides of the cup are still asymmetrical, and the black edge on the left seems too thin! ? This problem comes from the glass itself, or the relative position relationship between camera, glass and blackboard. In other words, you can adjust the thickness of these black edges as long as you adjust the position of glass and plate!

Does the left and right black edges really look symmetrical after adjustment? But what seems to be missing? Generally, we want the glass to look a little layered, but the layer in the middle of the glass is actually? Background imaging? You can imagine that this shape of glass is somewhat like a lens. Therefore, to change the level of glass, it is necessary to polish the background instead of directly polishing the glass. Change the visual appearance of glass by controlling the background light?

With a small light source, the background light can have more light and shade levels than simply using a soft mask.

Everyone should have seen the difference in the shooting results! ? A little brighter in the middle of the glass is basically ok, but in fact, the edge of the glass can also be "blackened".

The way is to take a blackboard to block the light above, and you should be able to see that the cup mouth is darkened.

But here, because of the angle of refraction, the blackboard in the picture will not be easy to avoid, so we are lazy to use the version with dark edges (because we can basically see the edges) for post-processing.

Adjust the overall contrast slightly to make the layers more obvious, and then modify the details to complete the glass photo. Although all this seemed easy, the first time I shot glass, I totally suffered. The bitterness of this is probably only known when you shoot it yourself! )

Compare it with the original picture.

You should find that the "existence" of glass is actually controlled by the whole lighting environment. Once the lighting environment is changed, the "visual appearance" of glass will also change, which is why this example is particularly easy to make people feel that photography = painting with light.