Tonight (hey, the sun's not up yet, so I can still say
that) I improvised a sort of modelling light. I wanted
to photograph the guitar-damage to the fingernails of
my strumming hand, including wearing right through the
acrylic that a nail salon applied to the ones that get
the most wear (middle, ring, and thumb -- I leave the
index and pinkie bare), exposing the real nail underneath
(and, this time, a completely shattered acrylic nail with
most of the white part of the real nail torn off... no
pain when it happened, but rather startling). Leaving
aside the awkwardness of doing everything one-handed,
this is a somewhat tricky macro subject, trying to show
detail in white-on-white. (Suggestions welcome.)
I wanted to know where the shadows would go. After
finishing off the tail end of a roll of Fuji Press 800
in the KX with only moderate magnification (my K-mount
extension tubes and my reversing ring went in the
burglary), I threw an old roll of TMax in an H1a (no,
I don't like TMax much, but I figured I might as well
use it up, and I _know_ I'll get more chances to photograph
damaged finernails -- I play Scottish music, loudly)
and putting a recently acquired 50/1.4 & bellows combination
on it.
What I wound up doing was putting an AF280T on an optical
slave attached to a mini-tripod that has a velcro strap
and right-angle cross-section legs, and lashing that to
the pole of a brass floor lamp so that the flash tube was
very, very close to the light bulb. Then I put a Vivitar
2000 (because it has a PC cord built in and the H1a has no
flash shoe and my PC-to-shoe adaptors were in the stolen
camera bag) on a PC extension cord plugged into the X socket
of the H1a, and set it nearby, pointed at the slave. After
several shots like that at different magnifications, I turned
the head of the AF280T to point _at_ the light bulb (and
therefore, I hope, splashing the lamp's reflector).
If, when I get the prints back, I decide this more or less
worked, I'll know how to improvise a modelling light for macro.
I'm not sure the lamp is bright enough to give me a good idea
what it'll do from farther away, but if this works then I can
proceed to experiment with similar approaches for non-macro
lighting in the future (until I do manage to come up with the
money to buy studio lights someday, anyhow). I didn't worry
much about how bright the incandescent lamp was, because it
was effectively a one-light setup (the Vivitar was only adding
a little indirect light, and much of that was bouncing off the
lamp's reflector anyhow, I think) and the incandescent was at
least four stops dimmer than the flash.
I wouldn't want to leave the black plastic of the AF280T's casing
next to an incandescent bulb very long, of course, but this didn't
take very long.
-- Glenn, about to go
to sleep
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