Butterfly and chimes

This was another photograph where I am experimenting with multi point, multi colour lighting. The beauty of this photography is, the whole background is in light yellow colour and the foreground subject ( chimes ) with the butterflies has a bluish silver colour with no tint of yellow whatsoever.

Settings : 1/60 sec at f/4.0 , ISO 100 ( Tried with f/1.8, until f/3.5, but I did not get the sharpness I was looking for, hence I went for f/4)
Lens: 35 mm ( f/1.8 )lens
Camera : Nikon D3100

Lighting

  1. External flash with yellow gel,pointing 45 degrees, so that the background( the wall and the guitar) has a yellow tint
  2. CFL from left(both of them were ON), providing silver colour for the chimes and reflector from right ( providing multiple reflection, since the surface of the reflector is NOT smooth)

DSC_6396 (Lightroom)

Behind the scenes
The initial plan was to use one CFL light stand and flash. But pointing the flash directly at the chimes resulted in lot of unwanted reflection ( even in the lower flash setting) The chimes bars started looking like one big long rod of light
With the flash out of the equation, I had only one source of light and that was not adequately reflecting the light and hence I brought in the reflector. After carefully placing the reflector at different angles and trying different shots, I got the perfect reflection from the chimes that I was looking for

After this, I concentrated on the right flash setting in aperture mode. The flash was pointed at around 45 degrees so that the light does not hit the chimes but wall, at an angles, and hence the variation in the color on the wall. Thought of going with the blue filter but at the last moment changed it to yellow filter

Also added the guitar in the background, because the background was just blank.
DSC_0026

Post processing
Minor colour correction was done to avoid too much yellow in the shot and also reduced highlight in the top right part of the frame( due to flash hitting there)

Other creative ideas

  1. The chimes look very flat, find out how to bring the round shape using lighting
  2. More separation between each chime module
  3. Bottom-up shot ?
  4. Multiple chimes and some of them in bokeh
  5. Chimes in motion,chimes hitting each other and cap

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