Master The Light Webazine

The Task

To take a rose and light it only using candles…

First Place – Nick Raper

I was quite excited about doing this challenge as I didn’t realize the light really was just light, in whatever shape or form, and it was only when I started experimenting with the candles that it all made sense. I decided that a black background would work best as it would focus all the attention on the rose. Having done a fair number of portrait type shots, I decided to light the rose as if it were a person. My main light came from a strip of wood which holds 6 small round candles in a row. This would give a nice wrap around light similar to a large softbox. In addition, I used one tall candle as a fill from camera right, and a small candle as a rim light from behind and right of the rose. All of the candles were flagged from the background to keep it black, as well as from the camera to avoid lens flare. Light intensity was controlled by moving the candles closer or further away.

Camera and exposure info:

Canon 5D Tripod mounted with remote shutter release

100mm F2.8 Macro lens

Aperture: F2.8 to add interest by having some parts of the rose out of focus.

Shutter speed: 6 seconds

ISO: 50

Adjusted white balance, brightness and contrast.

Converted from RAW to JPG.

Second Place – Suren Pillay

I’m a strange fellow when it comes to photography – as per usual, I wanted to create a different and distinctive image – I  had the mental picture of a rose in my mind, lying on a bed of gel spheres, lit from below with a blue light, and flames in the background. So, I went out and bought 20 tea lights and 6 normal candles as well as some of the gel beads (which set me back R40 for the lot).

I decided to construct a raised stage with a glass shelf I “borrowed” from my refrigerator, and covered it with a layer of blue cellophane (an alternative to a gel).  On this, I laid the gel spheres, and on top of that, I placed the rose.  What I had essentially created was a “runway” of sorts which allowed me to play with depth-of-field (DoF) effects.  Of course, with low power light sources, I placed the camera on a sturdy tripod since shake would definitely be an issue.  I also wanted to shoot my lens at the top end of its zoom range in order to make the size of the background effects as large as possible relative to the size of the rose (the opposite effect to short-lens distortion)

I hate noise and my 300D is pretty noisy, so I placed the camera on ISO 100 and adjusted the aperture (under ETTL flash) until I had a DoF that just covered the rose.  At such a close range, this worked out to F8.  From prior experience, I know that my Canon F3.5-5.6 28-135 is rather sharp at anything between F6.3 and F13, so that’s where I left it.

Then I removed the flash, lit the candles which were intended to light the rose itself (group 1, indicated in blue on the diagram below).  I decided that I wanted to have at most 4 of the tea-lights and half of the normal candles since I had a rough idea on what I was going to do with the other groups.  With that done, I proceeded to iterate towards a decent exposure, which came out at 4 seconds and I had to put the camera on self-timer to avoid any shake from hitting the button.  This exposure was just long enough to use movement in the shot (i.e. move lights around, move modifiers, etc) in order to create effects, but right now it left me with a fairly evenly lit (and boring) shot of a rose.

Then, I flamed up the lights underneath the platform (group 2, indicated in gray on the diagram below).  By shining upwards through the cellophane, even though they were a distance away, they provided just enough of a hint of blue to differentiate the gel beads from the ambient light.  It turned out that I needed 8 tea-lights to balance the blue in where I wanted it.

Thereafter, the last thing which remained was the background lights (indicated by orange on the diagram below).  As expected, they were rather harsh since they shone directly into the lens, and produced a large blowout which distorted the balance of the image – this much I expected. What I did not expect was that the orange light of the candles caused orange specular highlights that overwhelmed the blue from the bottom lights (group 2).  I compensated for these effects by doing three things – first, I strapped together two Cokin graduated neutral density (GND) filters, to fade out the top part of the image, making the flames in the background less bright, by holding a sheet of cellophane in between the background flames and the camera (dimming them further and coloring them slightly… alleviating that boring old candle color cast) and lastly, by hanging a sheet of crushed metalized polyurethane from the backdrop to catch the reflection of group 3 as a specular highlight and throw it back at the camera, softening the contrast between the bright flames and what was then a plain black backdrop.

With a few test shots, I managed to arrange everything to produce the balance of light and composition that I wanted.  So much for the easy part – thus far everything was fairly scientific and repeatable, but to turn candles into “plasma” you need to get the flames to move – hence I deliberately fanned the candles in group 3 during the exposure and with a few adjustments for height and distance, I managed to get several shots with interesting “plasma” behind the rose, and chose the one attached.  Overall I’m pretty happy with it, but I don’t like the so-called ni-san bokeh (the jagged blur in the out of focus areas)… this is largely due to the aperture configuration of the lens used and as much as I would have loved to shoot this with an F2 135mm L-series lens… I can’t afford one J

Third Place