Technology and stone

Tinkering with “flatter” light I decided to use some kit that New Trent had sent me for review to see how it held up to having its picture taken.

For this experiment I used LED strip-lights (they come in rolls actually) from www.ledhut.co.uk and nice thing about that is the room I had this gives a nice, even, light all over with very few shadows.  The downside is that for this kind of work I needed to have a longer exposure (1/25 second) with the short depth of field (f/1.8) and the prime 50mm lens (and close-up screw-on filter) I was using.

I’m quite pleased with the outcome though I needed to turn the screen brightness right down on the phone so that the image on screen didn’t need to be put on afterwards (which would look either fake or take me ages) or just get blown out.  I did try with an HDR image but the slightly darker shot (bracketing with 3 images, 1 stop apart) gave a nicer result.

Final processing in Lightroom, with a little work to get the stone colour balance to an appealing shade as the white point in room was a little on the blue side.  Fortunately, as you can create profiles very easily in Lightroom, it was a simple enough job to process one image and then apply the changes to all of the others.

I may revisit this as I have acquired a broken macro lens (no autofocus motor) to see if the outcome is as easy to attain as with the close-up screw-on filter.

Oh yes, and the chargers are awesome, much better built than my old no-name one (the spring inside actually popped the entire thing apart) – stylus/stylii I have a love/hate relationship with – I love the idea, I just don’t get on with them very well.  Better for someone with smaller hands perhaps but it must be said these are much smoother to use than the old rubber tip one that came with the phone.  Excellent kit, highly recommended, could do with better cables (who uses a 30cm cable) instead of providing two chargers but you probably have the right cable somewhere at home in that nest of cables don’t you?…maybe that’s just me. ^_^