What are you doing during cold wet winter months?

When the nights are long (granted they are getting brighter now) and it's cold and wet out, and kind of 'blah'.  How do you keep busy with your photography?  

When I have nothing scheduled for my studio I usually create a few "still life" shoots.

You don't need a studio, but I have one so that's where I do it, but years ago I pushed the furniture around in my living room and made temporary space. It could be any space in your house or even the garage if it's a large enough open space, but you need some place where you can make it completely dark so your photo lights will be the only influence on the photos, a 10 ft diameter open area would be ideal, but you can do with less. I set my camera for the flash sync speed when using flash, and I use my remote on-camera flash control, so I can have full control of my lights from the camera position. For "still life" shoots it's best to not have the light's on the camera, but at different angles around the object that you  are photographing. I always turn on one room light somewhere in the room so I can see what I am doing, and then do a "Test shot" or two without any flash, while adjusting the F-Stop of my camera upward until I get a completely black photo, or nearly so. If you do this, you will be able to see what you are doing well, but this room light will not affect your shots and only your flash will cause the lighted areas in your following shots. Now, you are in full control of the light in your shots, as long as you leave the camera on this F-Stop setting. The amount of light and it's direction, etc. will then only be what comes from your flash.

Find a small table or something to place your chosen object that you will be shooting on. A table cloth or even a cloth napkin of your color choice for improving/hiding the table surface of the table helps.  Pick something interesting to shoot, ie. a bottle of wine, a vase and flowers (even plastic flowers, if they are real looking). Set up your lighting and then try things. Work your lighting to get the best shots, changing positions and power levels to see what happens. Experiment, work the light and the shadows, taking a few shots after every change from slightly different positions. Try adding something else to the table, or changing one object for another. A simple place setting, or a glass and pitcher of colored liquid, etc. are all good choices. 

You will be learning how your lights work, how wide they light, how soft/hard the light from them is, how near/far your lights need to be for this kind of shot. What you can do to control where the light falls on your subject, how hard or soft the light is. Start with just one light, then add a second, but use only the second light until you know the result that you get from it. Then try the same with both lights and you will see how more than one light source can affect the shots. Experiment with the light using diffusing materials and reflectors. Learning your lighting this way will make you a much better photographer while giving you something valuable to do on those dull days.

Attached is a photo that I took back before Christmas 2023. It was an experiment to see how small a diameter that I could get the light from a studio strobe. This strobe happened to be a 400 watt/second, but turned way down. A Snoot (funnel shape) attached to the light with the light about 5' from the roses didn't control the diameter of the light very well at all. So I removed the snoot and installed a standard 7" round reflector, but added a 7" 40 degree grid (basically a honeycomb) to allow only the light rays coming straight out of strobe and up to 40 degrees from straight. It wasn't near enough control, so I changed the grid to 10 degrees and got the result in the attached photo. I have used grids many times over my many years of photography, but had never used the 10 degree before. The resulting light hitting the roses from 5' away was about 8" in diameter and exactly what I was looking for. I reduced the strobe power level a one stop, until the table and vase were almost invisible.

So the roses are all that are seen when first looking at the attached photo, yet the vase and table can be seen, but just barely. If this was for a customer I would remove the bright spot on the vase in post, or would have used a blocking method to prevent the bright spot, but this was just the beginning of my experiment that day and I did not need to please a customer with it. 

Charley 

 

Winter months have some the most beautiful landscapes.  Just pick the right day and get out with your camera. 

I get out and shoot landscapes, but do inside stuff too

I still head out, perhaps not as much as during the summer months.  But also do portraits more during winter months and also work on wildlife around where I live.  

Deal with it and try to find the beauty