snorkie128
Balls and Bokeh
Day 328 of 365
"Balls and Bokeh"
Tinkering yet again with some of the products from an ongoing job, I am working on showing the scale of the company's products. These are the larger ball bearings used as a coating for some of their metal tubing. As I understand, some of these little guys were attached to the Mars Rover. I had envisioned a bouncing wall of these tiny spheres, but timing it was near impossible. I could have used my Mumford Time Machine to trigger the shutter off of the sound of the balls hitting the Plexiglass, but that is a whole production. I also didn't want thousands of tiny balls on the floor. Yes, one can slip on a few of these things. So, I focused on the tip of this pen, and corralled a few of the balls around the pen tip. As I dropped a pinch of them on the glass, one little guy managed to hide in the nib hole. Since I've been having so much fun with it, I attached my macro extension tube to my 100mm macro lens, and focused on the tip of the pen. Because the depth of field is so small, everything outside of that field blurs rather quickly. Despite what one might believe, I performed no post work on the image. The bokeh (the dreamy appearance of the out of focus balls) is natural, and works nicely with the reflection in the Plexiglass. Our key light is a strip box, very close at camera-left. One can see the white highlight in the edge of the tip of the pen. The second light is a bare speedlight, and it is bouncing off of a white seamless behind the piece of Plexiglass upon which the pen lies. I gelled the speedlight with a purple gel, and because the glass is simply reflecting the paper, the glass appears to be purple. The slight gradient from top to bottom is the result of the light illuminating the lower part of the paper, and the light dissipating as it reaches higher on the paper. Thanks for dropping in!!
#balls #ballbearings #marsrover #pen #macrophotography #depthoffield #canon5dmarkIII #canon100macro #macro #plexiglass #gels #purple #paulcbuffinc #paulcbuffeinstein #stripbox #pocketwizard
Balls and Bokeh
Day 328 of 365
"Balls and Bokeh"
Tinkering yet again with some of the products from an ongoing job, I am working on showing the scale of the company's products. These are the larger ball bearings used as a coating for some of their metal tubing. As I understand, some of these little guys were attached to the Mars Rover. I had envisioned a bouncing wall of these tiny spheres, but timing it was near impossible. I could have used my Mumford Time Machine to trigger the shutter off of the sound of the balls hitting the Plexiglass, but that is a whole production. I also didn't want thousands of tiny balls on the floor. Yes, one can slip on a few of these things. So, I focused on the tip of this pen, and corralled a few of the balls around the pen tip. As I dropped a pinch of them on the glass, one little guy managed to hide in the nib hole. Since I've been having so much fun with it, I attached my macro extension tube to my 100mm macro lens, and focused on the tip of the pen. Because the depth of field is so small, everything outside of that field blurs rather quickly. Despite what one might believe, I performed no post work on the image. The bokeh (the dreamy appearance of the out of focus balls) is natural, and works nicely with the reflection in the Plexiglass. Our key light is a strip box, very close at camera-left. One can see the white highlight in the edge of the tip of the pen. The second light is a bare speedlight, and it is bouncing off of a white seamless behind the piece of Plexiglass upon which the pen lies. I gelled the speedlight with a purple gel, and because the glass is simply reflecting the paper, the glass appears to be purple. The slight gradient from top to bottom is the result of the light illuminating the lower part of the paper, and the light dissipating as it reaches higher on the paper. Thanks for dropping in!!
#balls #ballbearings #marsrover #pen #macrophotography #depthoffield #canon5dmarkIII #canon100macro #macro #plexiglass #gels #purple #paulcbuffinc #paulcbuffeinstein #stripbox #pocketwizard