Assignment 4: Specular Control

This exercise is all about specular control. Aka, knowing that many times your light source will be fairly well reflected in some shiny object in the photo (glasses, metal, furniture, etc.) and using that to your advantage by creating the desired reflection. Sometimes this might be maximizing reflection by making the source very small and harsh, other times it will be minimizing the reflection by making the source very large and diffuse.

For my subject today, I chose a few empty beverage containers that happened to be lying around my desk. One being glass is highly reflective, the other 3 being printed aluminum have less reflection. I wanted, with my limited resources to have a vertical, lengthwise reflection for the primary source, so I bounced my Auto128 flash from behind the cans to the right, onto a large white sheet of foamcore. This turned my flash into a 30"x40" rectangular light source, which also helped to minimize the shadows on the background. In addition, I provided a bit of fill from the left with a couple sheets of copy paper.

I'm pretty pleased with the results, though I didn't do a whole lot of playing around with this. I plan to in the future, but tonight I wanted to get through something since it's been a few weeks since I made any progress.