Exercise 9: Softening the light.

"Set up a still-life arrangement, with any object or group of objects.  The lighting direction will depend on the subject, if in doubt, fix the naked lamp more or less overhead, pointing down.  Take two photographs, one with just the naked lamp, the other with a piece of translucent material held between the lamp and the subject.  The two exposure settings will be different, look at the results and note what differences can be seen, for instance, at the strengths (blackness) of the shadows, their extent and hardness of their edges.  Look also at the highlights and at the contrast, finally, was the diffusion an improvement?

The ornament was chosen for it's shape, when I shone a light down onto it the shape of the shadow looked interesting, white card was used, it would make the shadows easier to see.  The light used was an angle poise lamp fitted with a Tungsten bulb and white tissue paper for the diffuser.

Naked light.

Diffused light.

I tried to correct the white balance in the raw converter of Photoshop, which was successful with the naked light image, however the photograph taken with a diffused light has a slight colour cast.  The shadow in the first image is, as expected, darker and clearly defined with quite sharp edges also the naked light picture has more contrast.  The diffused photograph has an overall softness about it, not just the shadow, if I could remove the colour cast, this would be my preferred image.