Alys had made some of her fantastic door-stop squirrels to exhibit (and hopefully sell) at the Midcentury Modern fair in Dulwich and it was the perfect opportunity to try out the main and slave flashes for product photography.
This is the link to the Midcentury fair, there are always some fantastic pieces there and it's well worth a look.
It took a while to get the lighting to look right, as I said in an earlier post when photographing dripping water, it's very easy to get harsh shadows. These look fine for the moody shots I was going for last time but wouldn't look right for these little guys.
It was a good chance to try out some (nearly) macro photography and the Sigma 24-70 EX DG lens really pulled out the stops for me. I had a bit of a problem at first getting the focus in the right place, but a lot of that was due to me trying to take these pictures while lying across the lounge floor. It's not completely happy wide open but seems to behave very well stopped down to about f4 although, saying that, shots at f2.8 are always usable.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with these photos. It was a really basic set-up, I used a roll of paper table cloth for the backdrop (you can see a bit of texture in the paper at the bottom of the squirrels and pincushions) and a jessops 360AFD flash on the sony alpha 200 to trigger the venerable Wotan SC 18 servo flash.
To soften the light I pointed the on-camera Jessops flash at the wall on one side and the Wotan at the wall and ceiling on the other. A reflector and/or soft box probably would have meant that I had a little more control but the white (and fairly low) ceiling meant that it worked out ok.
The jessops flash was a bit more powerful so I dialled it down a fair bit to match the Wotan's output. It's worked out quite well though and shows of Alys' latest creations very well I think.
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