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The Wetlands
Our group went for a walk around the lagoon at the south end of the Park on Tuesday. I am not sure yet what pictures we got but I am sure the exercise did us good. It is quite a long way and our comeras got heavier and heavier.
Comments by David Ellis
The Wine Glass
Rob Van der Linde’s wife wanted to throw out some slightly chipped wine glasses and Rob rescued them for the Photo Group to photograph.
Many professional photographers have a special shiny curved stage for photographing products. That’s a bit flash and expensive for us at the Shed, so we cheated. On a table, we placed one glass on top of the base of another upside-down glass, matching the bases carefully to create the reflection. We made a black box structure to block off reflections from the skylights.
A single light was placed under the table shining onto the white background. Some fizzy water was added to the top glass to create some bubbles. The glasses were photographed looking through them to the background.
I repaired the chipped glass in Photoshop then darkened the edges of the photo in Lightroom, changed the colour balance a bit and slightly lightened the dark tones in the base of the glass.
Comments by David Ellis
Rembrandt Lighting
The painting titled “Militia Company of District II”, is commonly referred to as “The Night Watch”. It is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is an extremely dark painting with some of the subjects barely visible. The high contrast lighting and low-key effect was commonly used by Rembrandt.
We set out to do something similar with the Photo Group members as models standing around the pool table. We used the open side doors and a sky-light as illumination.
Immediately we discovered that posing many people in a group to make a cohesive image was very difficult. We had to reduce the number of people in the picture to make it work. After several attempts we reduced it to four people. Rembrandt clearly successfully overcame some very real problems.
This picture by Ray Harvison shows Yuen Yoon photographing the final small grouping. Some balancing of brightness levels was done in Lightroom. The background of the Art Group’s paintings has been heavily darkened to be more like Rembrandt’s famous painting.
Photo taken by Ray Harvison
