I was recently interviewed by Frederick Van Johnson for This Week in Photo, and since our conversation was entirely focused on Weekly Fifty I wanted to share it with all of you here on the blog. You can read more (or listen to the audio podcast version of the interview) by visiting This Week in Photo, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or comments you might have.
Thank you!
Simon
If you have been following Weekly Fifty recently, you have probably seen some shots I have taken with my new color-changing LED lights. Today’s picture, then, will probably not surprise you as yet another in this series as I learn to use this new style of lighting in my photography. However, this shot contains a few key differences from the ones I have shared in previous weeks. First of all, even though I took all the pictures thus far with my 105mm macro lens this is the first one that is a true macro shot. Second, the subject here is almost entirely monochromatic: hard white plastic, rubberized black accents, and only the faintest bit of color with the button icons which are a shade of light bluish-purple. That means the coloring is coming not from the subject, but from the lights, which is something I’d like to explore more in the coming weeks and months.
I employed a rather unusual setup to take this picture, which presented some interesting challenges that were fun to attempt to overcome. First of all, I had a concept in mind for this picture which helped a great deal when I set out to actually take it. I knew I wanted a top-down view of the buttons on the controller, and I knew that I wanted a shallow depth of field as well. That meant I had to shoot with my camera pointed straight down, which meant I needed to use a tripod and angle my camera down. Fortunately my trusty Manfrotto tripod I have had for nearly 15 years did the trick quite nicely, but then I also had to use some boxes and even my wallet to bring the controller close enough to the lens, and positioned at just the right angle, for this shot.
After that I had to play around with the lighting. A lot. I tried different colors and different positions of the lights, including far away and close up as well as holding them in the air with my hands. I took several dozen shots but this one ended up as my favorite for a few reasons. First, the bright glow on the right side of the frame felt like just the right amount: not too much, but not too little. I also liked how there were little spots of orange light on the left side of the buttons that were created from the same light source. I am also really happy with the depth of field: the X is tack sharp while the rest fades away, which gives a sense of three-dimensional depth to the shot. Finally, the white plastic being cast in a soft purple thanks to the other light tube ended up working out really well too.
I also shot this at ISO 100 to get a nice clean image, but then realized afterwards just how dirty the controller was. I had to clean up a lot of dust and other minute imperfections in Lightroom, but that’s kind of par for the course with close-up shots like this. In the end this is probably my favorite shot I have taken yet, and only makes me more excited for what else I can do with these lights :)
Much like the pictures I have shared the past two weeks, there’s a story to tell here and one that I feel is enhanced by the lighting choice. And once again, this image comes to you courtesy of my new Nanlite Pavotubes which I am thoroughly enjoying and continue to find new ways to use, along with my 105mm macro lens which, though perhaps unnecessary for this particular shot, did come in handy because of its excellent optical qualities and the fact that I did not have to think about how close or far to get from the subject. With a macro lens, nearly any distance will work which is a huge benefit when you want maximum photographic flexibility.
I bought this iPod Nano for my wife back in 2004 shortly before we both graduated from college. She enjoyed listening to music and I thought this would be a fun surprise for her, so not long after Steve Jobs introduced it on stage I cashed in my big jar of spare change and bought one for her. She used it for a few years until it suffered the same fate as so many of its peers: the tiny internal spinning hard drive simply ceased to function. Now it adorns my bookshelf at work, where I can show it to colleagues and visitors and think about how much technology has changed over the years.
Enter the Nanlite Pavotubes :)
I figured this iPod mini would be an ideal candidate for a fun experiment with off-camera colored lights, and looking at the results I think I was right. I used a blue light to accentuate the metallic blue color of the device itself, and placed the light carefully so as to create a bit of a reflection on the small black-and-white screen. then used an orange light to add some color to the left side of the subject, and deliberately positioned that light to cast a shadow off to the top-right. In fact, it was this picture when I really started to think carefully about the shadows and not just the light. I adjusted all three elements of the shot (subject, lighting, and angle) to create the dual shadows you see here, while once again using the surface of our washing machine as a pretty cool way to add some shine and reflection to the image.
This turned out to be a super fun photo to take, and has once again shown me just how much there is to explore with these lights. I can’t wait for what’s next.
I’m not the kind of person who hangs on to a lot of physical objects. Digital clutter is fine, because it’s easily searchable and doesn’t take up much space in my house, but physical clutter is another thing entirely. It’s not that I throw away everything from earlier in my life, but I (along with my wife) try to be selective about what we choose to keep around and what to toss. This old cell phone is, for some odd reason, one of those things that has been sitting in various drawers, boxes, and bins over the years but, much like Bob Wiley, has never actually left. It doesn’t charge and wouldn’t work if it did, since the cellular network it used has long since been shut down, but it’s still a fun relic to keep around and show my kids.
I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here; a bit of context is probably needed in order to better understand this week’s picture.
The cell phone you’re looking at is the first cell phone I ever got. I think I received it as a Christmas gift in maybe 1999 or 2000, as an upgrade to the pager I used to wear around my belt loop. (A pager! Man, kids today will never know…) It couldn’t do much other than make calls and the battery died if the conversation lasted more than 20 minutes, but the flip-out antenna was super cool and it was small enough to fit in my pocket–a big deal for phones back in those days. This phone now sits on my office shelf at work, a reminder of my digital roots, so to speak, and though it serves no practical purpose I do think it’s fun to pick up and show people.
So when I got my Nanlite Pavotubes I naturally thought this old phone would be a fun photography subject. And while I don’t think I was wrong, I will say that there are some definite areas of improvement here. As I have said time and time again, photography for me is all about the learning process and I can most certainly see that process at work in this photo.
For starters, the black phone appears to have a kind of blue/cyan tint to it, which is a direct result of the color of light I was using on the right-hand side of the composition. Whereas last week’s shot of a Super Nintendo controller used light and shadow to accentuate the buttons and contours, the blue light here doesn’t really do much other than to cast a visible pall over the phone. It’s not great, and I think a more neutral light would have worked better. I also used a yellow light behind the phone to add some highlights but again, it seemed better in theory than in practice.
If last week’s shot was me gleefully exploring the possibilities of colored off-camera lighting, this week’s picture is a reminder that I also need to reign it in a bit: plan my shots, consider my subject, think about what the purpose of the lighting is…but also experiment and have fun because it’s all part of the learning process :)
So this is a huge departure for me. If you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time at all, you have probably never seen a picture like this before. But my goodness, you’ll probably see a lot more like this in the coming weeks and months :) It all started with a promotional video that I did for work back in April. Well, I didn’t actually do the video. I was asked to be in it for a few seconds, talking about one of my favorite books from when I was younger. As the videographer was setting up her gear I noticed that she had some small tube-shaped lights placed throughout the space, so I asked if I could look at one of them a bit more in depth. She gladly obliged and handed me one for me to check out while she told me a bit more about it. These lights (Nanlite PavoTube II 6C, along with one or two larger versions she had for the video shoot) could change colors at will, hold that color at a specific level of brightness, and even had built-in magnets for attaching to surfaces.
I was hooked.
It didn’t take me long to get a couple of my own, and the results have been incredible. I’m getting shots that I never knew were possible, all thanks to these little battery-powered bulbs that I didn’t even know existed. Paired with my macro lens, these lights immediately opened up entirely new worlds of photographic possibilities unlike anything I had experienced since I got the macro lens itself back in the fall of 2021. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend these lights since everyone’s photographic needs are unique, but I sure am having fun playing around with them and exploring a whole new side of photography.
Case in point: the Super Nintendo controller you see above. This is one of the first shots I took with the lights, but I think it turned out really well. I dug out this old video game controller (well, semi-old. It’s from our 2016 SNES Classic Edition but we do still have our original controllers in the closet somewhere) and set it on top of our washing machine to get a smooth, white, reflective surface. Then I set one light to purple and the other to a deep orange, mounted my D750 and 105mm macro lens on a tripod, and took a series of images that, in the span of a few minutes, blew my mind wide open.
I have some external flashes but I never considered how the careful manipulation of colored light could create such a dramatic effect on photography subjects. The rich colors, deep shadows, and highlights on the L/R shoulder buttons make this image spring to life in a way that I had previously only seen on the cover of magazines. Taking this shot was a revelation, and I’m absolutely stunned to think about the types of shots I might be able to take the more I practice.
This is going to be fun :)