Metal Sketches

This week we all shot our glass objects, which was interesting.  I’ll be posting a follow-up post to that soon.  My film came out too, which is always a huge plus.  Now we move on to our final assignment in this class, metal.

Another idea I had was to do something with thumbtacks…

Here’s a couple of extra photos to help my not-so-great sketches get their ideas across:

I like the measuring cups best, and I think the thumb tacks could be cool, but I’m not sure if filling the camera frame with a zillion thumb tacks is a good enough picture.  I think it’d be neat to play around with some colored cards for some of the reflections, but I’ll see how that goes, I guess.

Glass Sketches

Our critique for our first two Commercial assignments has come and gone, and now we’re on to glass and metal objects.  This week is glass (as you’ve most likely gathered from the post title).

There’s two main ways of lighting glass: You can shoot on a light background and darken the edges, or you can shoot on a darker background and use cards and soft boxes to lighten the edges.  You want to avoid the edges disappearing altogether, because then you’re not really taking a picture of anything…especially if the glass is perfectly clear.

Sketches for this week:

Some extra photos…

I kind of like the V-formation idea.  I think it could be interesting, if done well.

The parfait glass…

Also, I have these (below) that I think are kind of fun and cool.  I don’t think it would work well to use square jars with round, but Hobby Lobby has plenty more and they could be done in a group or individually.

Also, in regards to backgrounds, I’ve been waffling around a bit.  I think for the colored items, light/white would be best, but with the clear glass I rather like the dark background with light edges.  I’d also like to play around a bit with creating stripes with white/black cards and see how it looks.

Sketches for Class

So sorry to everyone for my month or so absence.  I’ve been here, but since maintaining the blog is no longer a requirement for passing a class, it’s slipped to the bottom of my to-do list.  I’ll be posting a little more often once again, mainly for class, but I’ll try my best to put something fun in now and again too.

This semester we (the students) are taking Commercial 1, and one of the first steps for an assignment in this class is to sketch out several ideas for setups and scenes that we will later recreate in the studio and shoot with the 4×5 camera.  Our teacher chooses one he (hopefully) approves of, and that’s the one we shoot.

For this assignment the goal is to go for things with texture.

Here are my first sketches:

Mr. P: Two other vague ideas I had were to use cantaloupe somehow…not sure how, really, but they’ve got a funky texture on them.  The other was, I have a stack of sketchpads that I thought would look neat, but it’s not a terribly tall stack, so not enough really for just a side view of just the pages, and I also wasn’t sure how it’d work to light that so you could see all the uneven edges of the paper.