Here comes the rain again

...falling on my head like a memory
...falling on my head like a new emotion

I wonder why I tend to think in song lyrics? Early Alzheimers?
Where was I...

Yesterday (Saturday) was a beautiful day. It must have hit 17°C and the sun was shining. I debated taking the camera out in search of great stuff to photograph, but I decided that my motorcycle was more in need of attention! So I took it out of storage, prepped and safety checked it, and went for a ride. Then I came back and... went for another ride! It's exhilarating to be in the wind again!

I did stop at a colourful place just off the highway where they do maple syrup the old fashioned way and asked the elderly lady if I could come back the next day with my camera. She was somewhat hesitant, but reluctantly agreed.

On Sunday (today), it rained. The maple syrup place was closed. I did go back — and I drove into Minden and looked at some potential photo ops: but didn't get out of the car in the driving rain. So I came home.

What does one do when it's raining? One shoots indoors! So I set my studio up and jury rigged the light tent so I could light it from underneath. Sort of a wonky idea,but I did it and then set out to test it. Here's the setup

My strobes are too bright so I set them up to reflect light into the tent rather than lighting it directly. Even so, exposures were f/22 at ISO 100. Notice the computer at lower right. I tethered the camera to the computer through Lightroom 3. It works effortlessly. Here's what the control panel on the computer looks like:

I was just testing it by shooting at the screen of the computer itself. The big button on the right is the shutter release. Click it and the camera takes the picture! A few seconds later, it appears on screen as big as you want it! Very slick.

The light tent works. I have to do a bit more setup if I want to do pure high key shots, but here are some examples of what I shot this afternoon.

I thought I'd try a couple of challenging shots. Light bulbs are challenging, when they're on a white background. Here:

This last shot is the only one where there was any Photoshop work done. And the only thing I did in  PS was to remove some dirt on the top of the bulb. All the rest of the work on all of these images was done in Lightroom.

I'll do a little writeup on shooting tethered in my technical blog, but probably not tonight! Drop back in a couple of days from now to have a look.

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