trying to work out how to light a slab of ice.

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stellarbeam

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I've been given an assignment by college. I need to do a location, tabletop studio setup (i.e at home minus the studio and all the fancy bits and bobs that the college has:|) The assignment title is "Winter" and are pretty free to do what we want...as long as it has nothing to do with Christmas.

What I want to try to do is freeze wintery berries / leaves / flowers in a large slab of ice and then photograph that (hmm...it might look a little christmassey but :razz:) I've pretty much got the actual ice bit worked out but as to lighting and photographing it I'm totally cluless!

Also I have next to no fancy equiptment, lighting wise. Just a flash gun that I could get a transmitter thingy so I could use it off camera. I have a reflector. I guess I'm looking for the most DIY way of doing this, and for as little money as possible.

Any ideas as to how I could go about this I'd love to hear.
 
I will confess that I'm not talking from experience here, but I would attempt to approach it by placing the light source so that it shines through the slab of ice, and the ice itself would act as a natural diffuser?

I would choose natural light say holding the ice up to a window and then use a reflector to bounce some light onto the camera side.

Interested to see what others with actual experience say?
 
Marcus Geezer said:
I will confess that I'm not talking from experience here, but I would attempt to approach it by placing the light source so that it shines through the slab of ice, and the ice itself would act as a natural diffuser?

I would choose natural light say holding the ice up to a window and then use a reflector to bounce some light onto the camera side.

Interested to see what others with actual experience say?
Click to expand...

That makes sense to me, whether it's lit my natural light, flash or a combination of the 2.
It seems to me that the easiest approach would be the hotshoe flashgun placed at the side, so that the light isn't travelling towards the lens, and with a reflector placed at the opposite side to mitigate its effect (if necessary), and with natural light providing fill. Control the flash exposure via the lens aperture and the effect of the natural fill lighting with the shutter speed.
 
liking garys thinking, nice diffuse natural light with hard flash in the ice would look luverly
 
Freeze the berries in ice cubes and add to a large glass of something nice. Shame to waste it :)
 
david1701 said:
liking garys thinking, nice diffuse natural light with hard flash in the ice would look luverly
Click to expand...

I agree, sounds like it would work a treat and look really good. You could also experiment with perhaps the natural light falling from above-ish and to one side, and placing the flash under the block if you can rig it up, perhaps with some additional diffusion on the strobe, see what happens.
 
Thank you for the responses everyone. It's given me plenty of ideas of how to do this. I'll be doing this project in a week or so, when I get back to Edinburgh after the holidays. I'll let you know how I get on and will post my results and any various experimentations with it. :)
 
I would personally grab a sheet of white paper, put it on the right of the ice and bounce the flash off that. Mainly because I don't have any off-camera flash facilities :-)
 
I would put your flash behind a vertical white cotton sheet (chair can act as a good support). Use that as a backlight. Try using black cards at each side get some contrast. Alternatively put a black sheet over the centre of cotton to create black background.
Then maybe another flash could act as a sidelight at quarter power.
 
Maybe try lighting it from beneath?
Cut a hole in a peice of card and fire the flash through that? Might look good with a black background...?
In fact I know it does...:thumbs:
I think I had a similar college project about 20 years ago...lol
 
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