fifi’s graffiti

I’ve always shied away from using artificial lighting in my photos. I think it started with the temporary blindness I incurred as a child after facing the pop of exploding flashbulbs. Then there were the dreadful red-eye shots I took of my friends in high school with an Instamatic 100, with its flash cube that rotated so you could snap four shots without changing bulbs. Studio lighting in a college photography class stressed me no end. The final straw was an attempt to balance an off-camera flash in one hand while manually focusing my Nikon F3 in the other. I sold the flash and vowed to stick with outdoor photography.

Recently, though, I found myself envying the wonderful tabletop shots from some Flickr friends and lamenting my lack of expertise. I was loathe to spend money on strobes, soft boxes, or umbrellas to simply experiment. Then I found this “how to” for a Do-It-Yourself $10 Macro Photo Studio. I didn’t have any external flashes, but I did have a couple of desk lamps and a cardboard box. I cut away three sides of the box and covered them with white rice paper. The article recommended tissue paper, but rice paper was all I had on hand. It’s more opaque than tissue, so I had to use a higher ISO, but the gist of this is that It Worked! I struggled all day to get the exposure and white balance correct, and you can see the results above. The only retouching is a bit of sharpening.

I don’t know why my brain couldn’t formulate such a simple project on its own.

The perfume bottle is by Niki de Saint Phalle. Candy by (oh, wait, they’re not giving ME any advertisement).