Research book 6 - 10th December 2015

Darkfield and Brightfield Photography

WHY IS GLASS SO HARD?

Glass is hard to shoot for several reasons

• It has mirror qualities and it reflects almost anything in front of it creating distractions
• It is transparent and light just goes through it making it hard to define its shape
• It is very smooth and punishes up for every speck of dust

DARK FIELD LIGHTING

In dark field lighting, we use a dark background. If all we used was a dark background our glass object will have no shape. The way to overcome this is by highlighting the glass edges.

The edges are lit by light, bigger than our background and right behind it. For that we want to keep out background small, and use a sheet of semi-opaque material for creating the light source.

The image above was taken using the setup below. The light is coming from a single CFL bulb and reflected from the background and from the two simple V-cards. (The V-card have a white side on their back).

The black background is seen through the body of the bottle, but the edges are defined by the light that goes behind the black card and reflected by the v-cards.

BRIGHT FIELD LIGHTING

In bright field lighting we do the exact opposite from what we did in dark field.

The background is lit and the body of the glass pears to be white. The edges are defined by dark cards that create “negative light”.

Again, the background light is limited to the smallest area possible to reduce flare.

The image on the left was taken using the setup below.

Two CFL snoots were used to create a contained white background, and black cards were used to define the edges of the glass.

(Information and \images found at http://www.diyphotography.net/crossing-over-to-the-dark-field-has-never-been-easier/ on 16.12.2015)




In this session we looked at Darkfield and Brightfield photography. These types of photography are mainly used when photographing glass and shiny objects.

For the darkfield set up 4 pieces of black card was required set out as shown below, a single light source behind the card that sits behind the subject and a snoot above the photographer. We later decided to add different colour acetate to the lights to add colour into the images as well as adding a liquid to the glass.

Here are the images and the set up...

Please note that all of these images were taken by the group as a whole so that we could have practice with setting the lights up, changing the set up, taking the images and trying the coloured gels

I really enjoyed this studio session, it was great to have a play with different lighting levels as well as add the extras e.g the coloured gels and the juice in the wine glasses for effect. I would definitely like to try something like this again and feel confident with how the set up needs to be. It is useful to know if ever given the chance of doing some product photography involving shiny/glass/metal objects. 

We also did images for light field using lilies. Below is the set up we used which was very similar to the dark field but without the black card behind the lilies. For this we used a DSLR.