Port and Tobacco

[Frank Schmidt]

Still Life of Port, Tobacco and Rose.

I’ll try to remember How I Took It. Had to shoot this and edited it several times before I got to this point.

f/ 20, ISO 125 using an 85 mm Canon lens. I set the White Balance at white fluorescent (I think that is 4000 degrees).

Set up the scene and turned off the room lights. Lit the candle and opened the shutter, blew out the candle after 3 seconds (you can do this by walking in front of the camera because with the lights off it won’t record your image).

Then I turned on a 40 watt incandescent light bulb at 10 feet away and bounced it off a white wall for 10 seconds while shining an LED flashlight on the background to wash off some of the shadow from the light bulb.

After turning off this “camera-right” bounce fill light I hit a small mirror (camera left) for 3 seconds with a spotlight which bounced back and filled both sides of the wine glass from behind.

Then I went to the other side of the scene and applied more LED flash light from camera left but avoided the white images like the urn and lace as much as possible; this is what took a lot of practice to avoid over-exposure of white objects.

In edit I adjusted the brightness, cropped and signed it. Biggest challenge was getting enough light on the tobacco without over lighting the lace below it.

Simple as that, no flash or strobe. All one exposure: 93 seconds of open shutter on a tri-pod; and I was a busy boy during that time.

(If you want to see some composition masterwork go look at Natilie Panga's stuff :

Natalie Panga: Art, Design & Photography | RedBubble)

See more of my work at: FrankSchmidt | RedBubble

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