Harold Gough wrote:I am keen to investigate back-lighting with my system before spending much time at high magnifications.
I did a quick, half-hour session this morning.
Yesterday I noted a lump of moss with fruiting bodies which would be good for baclighting, so I fetched it. It was not an ideal specimen, in terms of alignment of stems, etc. but it was adequate. I started with a fairly thick (horizontally) piece and then sliced off the distracting backgound section.
I did some "thinking outside the box". My grey card was still on its walkabout so I inverted a grey plastic washing-up bowl, normally resident in our kitchen sink, the closest I have come to actually using the kitchen sink in this project!
. I inverted it and placed the moss on the bowl's upturned bottom. Thus, it acted as both support and metering surface.
For backlighting I obviously needed to keep light off the side of the moss facing the camera while lighting the far side. So I did some more thinking, this time "thinking inside the box". I took an empty card coffee filter box and cut it to be about 10cm high, its other dimensions being 10cm x 10 cm. Thus, it was bottomless and topless but self-supporting. I cut an archway out of the bottom of one side, just higher and wider than the field of view (1:1)
The setup was as previously, except that the flash, hand-held, detached from either camera on a TTL dedicated cord, was pointed down into the top of the box, likewise the lens of the metering camera.
The operating aperture for the metering camera needed to be about f8. I used the flash initially undiffused then with a diffuser.
The lighting was moderated by moving the box backwards and forwards in relation to the moss. Focusing was partly with the helical of the framing lens and partly by sliding the plastic bowl.
The biggest difficulty was in getting enough of the subect aligned and in focus.
Here are the images (some slightly cropped for format) in the sequence shot. I have given tha same sort of processing that I would normally for images but the aim was not top produce exhibition qualty images but to roughly test the setup.
'Blue sky thinking' gives a blue 'sky'. A section of the blue-coloured box was fitted as a background over the whitish interior:
[Edit] Image further cropped, slightly, to remove excess black area, lower right. [Edit ends]
Whoops! I seem to have created a half-decent image!
[Edit] The following images each had a tiny white spot in mid air in the same position, possibly a tiny reflection from the background.This has been cloned out.[Edit ends]
Blue background, but image considerably darkened for effect:
Similar with some darkening
Similar without darkening
I then replaced the blue card with some matt black flock material I recently obtained for removing reflections from inside my lens to camera adapters. This is likely to be the standar background.:
This is well on the way to the kind of result I wanted:
Essentially, this project is ended, having demonstrated the versatility of my system. All aspects of it need to be refined and may have to be tailored to specific subjects.
That said, I have some thoughts on an outdoor version. What I have not actually done, but know will be no problem, is to mount, say, a ringflash on the E-P2-mounted lens, and trigger and meter it from the OM4.
I hope this has been of interest, and possibly might help someone. I have use one film camera and one digital but I don't see why it could not work for two of either.
Before long I should be posting images of subjects illuminated by flash, using this system.
Harold
My images are a medium for sharing some of my experiences: they are not me.
!
