Today was my day "off". Thursday. While everyone else is working, I have Thursday off. Great day for catching up on things, in theory...
Today I had to buy some more DVD's to burn, because they wanted enough to share in a large family, so I needed to burn 3 more and drop them off tonight.
Well, I thought, lets have some fun, and work todays photo into the drive.
While we were away over Christmas the house became a spider and ant breeding ground, and I also believe a flea market too :) So I had been to Bunnings earlier this week and bought some Insect Bombs, you know the aerosols that lock open and you have to leave the house for a few hours and they're supposed to magically get rid of all your woes? Yeah those. I tell my clients to use them, so I decided I might as well practice what I preach... for the first time ever.
Now this is the photo idea.. War on Spideys. Spidey Skirmish. I wanted to create a somewhat comical scene of me persuing spideys with an Insect Bomb and the pressure sprayer I use to spray outside the house, a bit like a WWII mustard gas scene. It needs a gas mask! This is where I had decided to use the drive to deliver the DVD's to my advantage. I had lent that ghastly mask you see in the picture to one of my vet nurses. She is pregnant, and I told her to either be very diligent with the anaesthetic gas scavenge systems, or wear the mask. She is on leave, so I decided it would make a fitting photo of the day. So on the way to deliver the discs, I dropped off at the clinic, and grabbed the mask.
This was shot on a gross grey patchy muslin backdrop. Two softboxes behind at 10:00 and 2:00, a bare flash with 1 + Green and 1/2 + Green gels on them, and a beauty dish at 7:00. The soft boxes served as a rim light, as well as lighting up the smoke/fog. They were grided to control the spill a bit. Photoshop was minimal - just to add some pop. No cloning, small amount of masking. I metered the softboxes for f/8 each, with combined f/9. The beauty dish was metered at f/4.5, I think I shot at f/7.1, iso 400.
So you can see above this is the set up shot. The green gelled flash was on the shaft of the stand holding the 70x90cm box, held on by a manfrotto superclamp.
I guess I could have added some orange to the foreground, but I am pleasantly surprised by this image. I took a bit of time to think about how it was all going to come together, and I would like to know how to do some more fancy photoshop on it, but for today I am quite happy with this.
The fog machine is a generic branded fog machine I picked up today from Jaycar. It has "Rave" branded on it, but they're all the same design from the same factory in China I think. This one is 700w. I always thought they'd be a crap to use, and they'd need to sit and warm up just when things got moving. Uhuh. That's right. Might be best to have 2? It's great if you plant the shoot and have everything exactly as you want it, and know how the fog is going to flow in the room. It took a few goes, and often if I left it going too long the fog filled the room so the photo was obscured by a smoke cloud lit up by flashes :) I think when using these you need to plan, and be prepared to sit, wait, then jump to action. A lot of time is spent waiting for the machine to warm up, or the room to clear, or both.
But I LOVE the avenues this opens up. could do great for some creepy photos :)
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