Studio Photography: Lighting texture

When photographing still life objects, it's really important to have the correct lighting set up in order to capture the finer details and the textures and tones of the object.  

For this task I took a few items from home, which I thought would be ideal for texture.  Wasn't sure what to bring so just grabbed whatever was nearby.  I took an orange gerbera (to add a bit of softness) and some chickpeas, as I thought    the fine delicate petals of the flower would work nicely with the rough textures of the chickpeas. Although the colours complimented each other really well, I felt there was something missing.  This is when I decided to use one of my class mates shell alongside the other items.  Later on the day I collected a few leaves and tree barks to add a bit of variety to the images.

Photographing still life can be quite tricky and you may need to add various light sources to light up specific part of the subject.  You also need to have greater control of the lighting in order to create a certain mood or ambience as an inanimate object cannot react to different lighting conditions.   

For this studio session we used the Mamiya RZ67, which is a beautiful medium format camera.   
Leaf Valeo 17(LF5339)/Mamiya RZ 67      

http://www.lightingdiagrams.com/Creator

For the images below a flash light was placed high up from the back of the still life table, which had honeycomb and barn doors, almost directly opposite the camera.  This allowed the light to skim across the surface of the objects highlighting the textures.  The barn doors helped to control the direction of the light and and the honeycomb helped to diffuse it.  I used a gold card to eliminate the shadows that was falling on the chickpeas and to the side of the shell.  The good thing about using a gold card instead of a reflector is that you get nice patches of light instead of a solid reflection, enhancing the textures even further.       

This first image clearly shows the shadows and dark patches.  

  

The gold reflector has been positioned correctly which has helped to eliminate the shadows and  bring out the texture well. 

One the first image you can see a harsh shadow has fallen over the subjects with the light being positioned directly behind, and the second image shows the textures well as I placed the gold card in front.    

This is my final submission as I love the composition and contrast of colours and textures in this image.  The flower, leaves and tree bark work beautifully together and complement each other perfectly.  I think using the medium format camera has helped me to achieve a much superior quality of image, bringing out every single detail of the objects.  Which is why I did very minimal post production work on these images.