Astro Visual Photography

Sometimes it’s the mood or feeling we want to portray in our photo. Depending on what that mood is, we employ many different techniques.

OBJECTIVE:

It was a February and the forum I was regular to had a theme for the month of ‘Love, Romance, and Red’ so I created this shot to fulfill those requirements.

OBSERVATIONS:

Looking around the house I found some engagement glasses my wife and I were given and thought of the basic concept we see in the photo. Digging around a bit more, including my wife’s jewelery box, I saw the string of pearls. The scented, mood candle was often out on the coffee table so I put all these things together.

COMPOSITION:

I wanted the candle to be a feature but the hands, ring and glasses were more important to me. I usually steer away from centered, symmetrical type compositions but in this case I felt it might work ok.

SETUP & SETTINGS:

1/4th – f5.6 – ISO 320. 50mm focal length. No filters on the lens. Tripod. Spot metering.
The candle was throwing enough light from behind to illuminate the glasses in a subtle manner that befitted the mood I wanted to portray. However, with no light from a forward angle, the hands were dark and needed some light on them as well.

Obviously a flash would do that but it would have ruined the mood by lighting up too much. Diffusing the flash may have produced something close to suitable but I went for something more specific. I used two tiny LED lights for cycling. These are like the ones you see on keyrings etc. A single LED, not very bright at all.
The LED’s were then aimed at the ring finger on my hand and the thumb on my wife’s hand.

As people are not very good at being perfectly still for very long at all I bumped the ISO up a little so I could try to speed the shutter up a bit to avoid movement causing blur. A rule of thumb is that you can’t expect a person to be still long enough to even go under about 1/60th. However, in this case I was only shooting hands and they were resting on the coffee table so I decided I could get away with the 1/4th I used.

POST PROCESSING:

A slight sharpening, curves/levels adjustment.

END RESULT:

If I was more serious with this shot I would have done some more processing to make the LED lights a bit more yellow I think. Or placed some yellow cellophane in front of the LEDs to cast more yellow.

The wide aperture of f5.6 created a narrow depth of field (area in focus) that kept the hands and glasses in focus but created enough blur to allow the pearls and candle to still be recognizable but not be distracting.

Thanks for coming.

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