Self Evaluation on Glass Assignment
Qi An (Angie)
My goal of this assignment is correctly completing basic steps and creating the effect as the textbook shows. Since I know nothing about shooting glass before, I think I should learn well how to do the very basic setup before trying to be creative. So I did not do any trick when shooting this assignment (though I know Rita and Allison want more than a simple photograph of glass bottles), but did exactly what textbook and lab told me to do. So far I just want to make the glass clear and clean on the photograph.
However, the effect comes different from what I expected, which makes me really frustrated. Here is some of the problems:
Bright field: I used a big light source behind the background as guided, and two black boards to cover the parts within family of angles. But I did not see the strong, black edges of the glass, it came gray. I could not raise the contrast between the color of glass edges and of background. If I increased aperture, the whole image became over-exposed. I also tried adding lights on the top or from the bottom; it changed little except causing more over-exposure.
Dark field: That was a nightmare. Problem still lied in that I could not make enough contrast between glass and background to show they were two separate things: the glass looked like melted into the background. I tried to keep the background pure black while at the same time draw the outline of the glass with correct light, but it turned out terrible. I was also confused on how to make a fine-looking highlight: as the glass goblet was spherical, the highlight area appeared on more than one side of the goblet.
Anyway, I learnt some primary rules of photographing glass and I got a practice – though an unsatisfying one. Here I have an additional question: what if photographing something made of china? Porcelain may be kind of glass, but it does not transmit as much light. How to photograph a translucent porcelain and create proper highlight?
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