None of these photos really fit anything. One is old, and the others are new or recent. I’ll start it out with a shot of some beans I shot this morning.

Here is my desk at work. As you can tell, I keep it pretty cluttered.

And two shots of people. The shot of the bass guitar is from a show I went to last night in a basement. I only stayed for his act, in spite of having friends in later sets, because it was crowded, hot, and too short for me to stand up straight in, which is all kind of ways to make me not have a good time. So I cut and run, but the first thing was cool. Didn’t catch his name though (update, he is Albatross The Musical… Anyway, the other shot is of Josh Day. He’s a dork.

Without showing everything that will be included in this final Ad, I thought I’d go ahead and show you roughly what it involves. The splash uses 4 different photos, the stream is it’s own photo, and the bottle pouring the oil is it’s own photo. Eventually some soy beans will be involved, and obviously a bunch of text, but I liked how this closeup turned out so much that I decided to feature it here on the blog.

For those of you longtime readers, you’ll remember seeing a few studio shots of some different oils that basically ended up looking like booze because of the glasses they were in. The company didn’t take those shots for that reason, and we went with a new idea that required some splashing.

Apparently this is attempted by dropping a small solid object into a glass of that liquid. Sometimes you don’t always hit. Crazy things can happen.

Normally I don’t give technical specs for my shots, but a few people have already asked about these. The setup was very simple expensive light tents or lights aren’t really necessary. We used seamless white paper for the backdrop, a piece of glossy foamcore to set the oil on (to keep it from soaking to the floor), a 36″ piece of foamcore on the right of the photo for fill, and a 40″ softbox on the left for key lighting. I needed to shoot at about f/9 to get my depth of field at 85mm, so I needed to boost up to ISO 400 to get my sync speed of 1/250th of a second. (In hindsight, I wish I had shot faster and used partial sync, but for the purposes of the ad we needed some motion in the oil).

One light off camera, plus a 580ex used to trigger it. Paper, and fill. Simple setups make for great lighting.

Oh, I should point out too, that I have some extra sheen and reflection on the foamcore than you will normally see when shooting on it as a surface. This is a result of oil from previous shots glossing it to a pretty heavy degree, and we actually needed to wipe some of it off to keep from getting harsh reflections off the back paper.

Keep it real, folks.