52 Weeks - Week 2: "Rainbow"

My second week of the "Photo a Week" year was themed "Rainbow".  I'd had a very busy week, and wheras I normally take pictures every day, I had about 4 days this week without picking up a camera.  I had a couple of ideas for the theme in my head, but it took until Sunday evening (the last day) to actually get the shots.  Here's one of them:

(7D, 24-70L at 32mm, f2.8, 1/125s, ISO100)

I'd seen a shot of a piece of ribbon with floating scissors behind, and loved the idea, so I thought I'd recreate it with a bit of rainbow ribbon cable and a pair of old wire cutters.

I had a couple of ideas - either the white light tent with white cotton to suspend everything, or I had some new black paper roll which I thought might work well as a background with some black cotton to suspend the items from... something.  I looked around all over the place to try and find some kind of frame to mount the cotton on that would be adjustable to allow some setup, but I couldn't see anything, so I opted to start with the light tent.

I used a needle and white cotton, both ends poked through different places in the top of the light tent and looped around the ribbon cable to suspend it approximately in the centre of the tent.  I then did the same trick with the wire cutters.  The positioning was fairly approximate, and I had some extra thread to cut off, but I thought I'd take a few test shots and see how things looked first.

I put the light tent on a white duvet, and put my 430EX on it's little stand facing one side of the tent, as is shown in the picture below:

Once great thing about the 7D is it's ability to be master controller for a slave flash, so after a bit of fiddling around I settled on manual flash around 1/4 power, firing the 430EX from the camera (but not using the camera flash for any lighting) - this seemed to work best with some contrast and detail to the wire and cutters, and enough light to blow out the background.

Inside the tent, the wire and cutters were hanging down using the cotton.  In the end, I left the long piece of cotton hanging from one end of the pliers which I had intended to cut off (you can just see it in the picture below).  This served as a great control line - pulling it outside the tent meant I could control where the cutters were in relation to the wire, and pull them up tight to look like they were just about to cut!

And here's another one of the final shots.  They are pretty much straight from the camera.  I did a tiny bit of adjustment in Lightroom, and cloned a reflection out of the rear part of the ribbon where it caught the flash.  I also brightened a few bits of the background just to remove any traces of the tent.  I didn't bother cloning out the cotton as you can hardly notice it - it's the tiny white line tight to the Micromatch connector (the near red connector).

(7D, 24-70L at 40mm, f2.8, 1/125s, ISO100)

In the end I ran out of time to try the black background, but I think this is an idea I'll be playing with a bit...

I did, however, capture a few other rainbow shots.  My second idea was to use my polarising filter and some plastic.  Plastic has the ability to polarise light, and the amount varies depending on the makeup of the plastic and how it is stressed.

The setup involves two cross polarised filters to cut out all the light.  As I don't have a light table and big sheet of Polaroid, I used the next best thing - my monitor!  I opened up a big white window on the screen of my LCD monitor, and with the polarising filter on the front of my camera, I turned it to block all the light from the screen.  What you end up with is being able to see everything as normal (maybe a little darker than normal), but the screen is totally black.

Now for the best bit - if you stick some plastic between the two, you end up polarising the light from the screen in all sorts of different directions, and the result is a rainbow of colours (well, actually, that's not true, especially not from a computer monitor, but I won't get into details here):

 (7D, 24-70L at 50mm, f5.6, 1/100s, ISO1600)

The above picture is an empty CD "cake" box which woul dhave contained 50 CDs or DVDs.  And below is the bottom of a 1300ml plastic tub - the injection moulding point is visible to the right of the picture and you can see the coloured areas spreading out from this point.

(7D, 24-70L at 52mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO400)

So, I didn't have much time to take the photos this week, but in a way that's been useful as it left me to think about ideas of what to take.  I'm quite pleased with the wire shots - they're clean, well lit and ended up pretty much how I pre-visualised them  The polariser pictures are interesting too and I might play again sometime. 

Next week's subject is "Happiness"