Project 365 – Day Three Hundred and Twenty Seven – Glass of Marbles

It seems that I’ve been shooting a lot of wine glasses and marbles recently. Having been foiled in two earlier ideas for my photo today I’m afraid I’ve gone and combined the wine glass with the marbles.

The evenings keep getting a bit lighter, but I doubt that it will make enough of a difference for me to get out and about in the evenings after work before I finish (hopefully!) this Project 365.

I always knew that it would be hard to get through the winter months and I’m starting to feel rather guilty at churning out photos like this.

Canon 7D, EFS 15-85mm IS, 1/125 at f11, backlit using Nissin Di866 flash.

Project 365 – Day Three Hundred and Five – More Bloody Marbles

I think I’d better give the whole marbles thing a bit of a rest after this one. I picked these up last weekend in Nottingham along with the clear one I used on Day Two Hundred and Ninety Eight and thought I’d try to do something with them.

I’ve not been out of the house all weekend, being rather full of cold. My ears are blocked up, my nose is bunged, I can’t taste anything and I even seem to have got an infected eye-lid just to really make me feel low. Hoping I’m feeling better soon, and certainly before we reach next weekend. I want to get out somewhere with my camera. It doesn’t have to be anywhere amazing, anywhere will do.

Canon 7D, EF 100mm f2.8 macro, 1/200 at f11, lit using Nissin Di866 at 1/32 power off camera to right (you don’t say?!)

Project 365 – Day Two Hundred and Ninety Eight – Portrait in Marble

Having bought a few proper marbles yesterday (see Day Two Hundred and Ninety Two) I thought I’d give this one a try. Inspired by seeing various shots taken through larger glass balls over the years, and by seeing this blog post a few days ago (thanks to @KaveyF for tweeting about it).

I’ll be keeping at least one clear glass marble in my camera bag, they don’t add much weight or bulk after all. Hopefully I’ll remember to pull one out and shoot through it from time to time. I wonder what might be possible shooting through a row of a few of these?

Canon 7D, EF 35mm f2, 1/125 at f2.

Project 365 – Day Two Hundred and Ninety Two – Marble Madness

I’d had this one in my head to try for a while now, but I needed my flash gun back before I could give it a go.

I was “inspired” by or was trying to emulate the cover of the Marillion album, “Marbles” using my daughter Michelle as a semi willing model. Unbelievably I discovered that she doesn’t have any traditional marbles, the ones made of clear glass with spirals of colour running through the middle. These plain opaque blue ones were the closest she had (i’d shot them back on Day One Hundred and Fifty Eight in a totally different context).

And then of course I had to communicate what I wanted my model to do and she found it hard to hold her hands in the right place, and it was hard to keep her eyes open… and… well, this was the best I managed in the few minutes we tried for.

I decided to go with selective desaturation to add some impact to the “marbles” and after playing around with a few develop presets in Lightroom 3 I went with this rather yellowy tint for the rest of the image as it contrasted well with the blue of the marbles. A vignette was also added to draw the eye into the centre of the frame. Maybe I was a little too heavy handed with the vignette.

I didn’t land up with quite what I wanted, but I’m glad I tried and I’m reasonably happy with the end result.

Thank you to Michelle for being patient with Daddy. I promise next time I won’t ask you to do anything quite so tricky!

Canon 7D, EF 70-200mm f4 L, 1/60 at f4, Nissin Di866 set to 1/16 power firing into a white umbrella front and right of the subject.