Five

Five, a photo by Pantheroux on Flickr.

I have unfortunately just been afflicted by a hard drive crash. With frequent backups, I have only lost a handful of photos. Unfortunately the lost ones include some of my recent favorites like my long exposure gooseberry shots.

I go stir crazy over the winter. I hate cold weather and don't have much patience for ice and snow. Graem bought me some cut flowers to photograph, and while sitting in front of the computer munching gooseberries, it occurred to me that they might also make good photo subjects.

I wanted to take long exposures by candlelight, but it was harder than it looked. I wanted directional lighting, yet the falloff from candlelight is so abrupt that I had to bring the gooseberries so close to the candles I was worried about them catching fire...not to mention getting the candles in the frame. I ended up with 2 groups of 5 candles each, one off to camera left, and the other to the right of, slightly behind the gooseberries. I was pretty happy with some of my results. I still have the edited JPEGs, but unfortunately with the hard drive crash, my RAW images are lost.

For those who haven't guessed by now, my favorite things to photograph are flowers and insects. I also like to take pictures of dilapidated buildings, rusty machines and beautiful landscapes... but those are not as plentiful in my life.

In winter, everything is grey and dull. Yes, the snow is beautiful... but it's hard to spend too much time outside taking photos when exposed skin freezes in less than 10 seconds. There is a decided lack of sunlight in winter, and no flowers or insects to be seen for 6 months of the year.

In order to combat winter depression, I thought of setting up a little indoor studio to take still life shots over the winter... and maybe to learn to take portraits. I bought a single off-camera flash and I'm considering a more elaborate light set up. The flash has a very steep learning curve... I took a few photos that are interesting, but I'm not sure they're any good. I have one I will probably post another day. I'll have to experiment with the flash quite a bit more before I can truly say I'm in control of it.

I also got some candles and thought it would be interesting to take candlelit flower portraits. These are two of the best ones... Unfortunately my session was cut short because I brought the candles too close to the petals and literally fried my subjects! It's a good thing I was using cut flowers. The flowers were bright pink in real life. I didn't custom adjust my white balance and tried to do it afterward on the computer. I decided I preferred the orangey glow of the candlelight to the 'corrected' white balance.