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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue439" data-source="post: 822583" data-attributes="member: 53455">I am always happy to present my beloved “old stones”, of course, and most of the time I have to make a conscious effort not to expand too much on the contextual or historical information I provide, lest I bore my audience... Enthusiasts in any field are like that. Yet, and in spite of my fondness for this “Heritage photography”, as I like to call it, and of the fact that I know quite a few of those photos are very nice indeed, I must admit that the ones that make me the most proud are the tabletop ones I take with artificial lighting.In Heritage photograph, I photograph the world as it is. I don’t create much—I reproduce what I see as faithfully as possible. In tabletop photography, I get to photograph my world as I make it to be.In that process, you can really believe you’re God (albeit on a slightly smaller scale, admittedly) for a moment. It’s just like Genesis: at the beginning, there is darkness. And indeed, after you set up your product, or still life elements, or whatever composition it is you’re shooting, you take a first exposure with all the flashes off, and that photo must come out pitch black: in other words, you have set up your camera so that none of the light remaining in the studio or coming from the outside will be sufficient to create any amount of illumination in your frame (read: pollute it). All the light that will ever shine on that scene will be your creation, and yours only. Then —Let There Be Light!— you switch on the flashes and take another exposure. And from then on, you adjust and balance the light sources, insert modifiers, replace them, take them away set up white cards, or black cards... until you’re satisfied and you take the final photograph, lit just the way you wanted it.It can’t be denied that there is a lot more work in tabletop photography: first there is the setting up of all the elements that will compose your own “landscape”, and that requires imagination and patient care; and then, there’s the whole lighting and shooting part. If the result looks good, you can truly be proud of yourself because you’ve achieved it all by yourself from a blank page. When you come back with a great photo of a stupendous Romanesque church, you’ve had a tremendous amount of help from all those genius architects and masons and stone cutters and sculptors of long ago! All you have to do, basically, if pay them homage and showcase their work in your best natural light and in a way that respects the perspective and makes the stones sing as they were made to all those centuries ago...Thank you and congratulations to those of you who managed to follow me through all those ramblings. Here, have a drab of 16-year old Lagavulin to straighten you up!Nikon Z7, F-mount Micro-Nikkor 60mm ƒ/2.8 macro lens, FTZ adapter.[ATTACH=full]408575[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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