Holiday Special: Sausage

[sybren]

What are you looking at? It's a sausage. Rookworst (a type of smoked sausage), to be exact, probably well known to every Dutch reader. It was hand-made by my parents' butcher and wrapped with some Christmas fluff, also by the butcher. He handed them out as Christmas presents!

Before we go on the the specifics of this shot, first a few acronyms:

CTO: Colour Temperature Orange, makes the light warmer.
CTB: Colour Temperature Blue, makes the light colder.
ND: Neutral density, makes the light darker.

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The key light from high camera right is a 580EX-II, 1/2 CTO gel, double gobo'd so that it illuminates the sausage thingy and not the background, at 1/4th power. The fill light from camera left is a 430EX-II with a DIY white diffuser and a full CTB gel. The third light is a 430EX behind the sausage, at 1/128 power, with a red gel for the effect and a 2-stop ND gel to make it subtle enough - 1/128 power is as low as it goes, but that was still too bright.

I chose to work with CTO and CTB gels to add some contrasting colours. The gels are balanced, which means that where the warm and cold light meet they form white light again. This makes for some subtly coloured shadows, where only one light shines and the other is blocked. I chose 1/2 CTO and full CTB because it just looked better - with a full CTO the colours would become too orange.

Here you see an incremental buildup of the three lights (click for a larger version):