Timothy Armes' blog

I’ve just finished shooting some promotional images for local artisan Cécile Lienhard, so I thought I’d share some of the experience.

Cécile didn’t give me a remit, so I was free to do anything that I felt was appropriate. My main consideration was that her web site is a dark grey, so it was important that the images would marry well with this colour scheme.

I decided that I really wanted to capture her distinctive style rather than document the individual pieces themselves, that way she could continue to use the images to sell herself even once the particular pieces that she had passed on to me had been sold.

I started working with the clock, and after playing a little I thought that it would be best explored as a triptych.  This decision then lead me to on to create each of the final images as a composition of photos.  This sort of things often happens – I start out without any ideas in particular, and then once I actually take some photos the ideas come together.

The beautiful curves of this piece attracted me the most, so I made use of them in the final composition.  For the center photo of the whole clock I really wanted to give the image the dreamy magical feel that I get looking at Cécile’s work.  In the end I used  the Canon TSE-90 tilt-and-shift lens so that I could throw the object out of focus in a slightly unusual way – I just played with the tilt feature until I saw something I liked.

This was my first use of the Canon 5D Mk II in the studio.  I had it connected directly to the Mac with live view turned on so that I could see the large image on the screen as I was compositing the photo.

Here’s a photo that I took during the shoot.  I used a softbox overhead to provide a soft fill.  In the case of the clock I used a hard light to place a few specular highlights on the face.  I felt that these really gave a sense of both the relief in the glazing and it’s shiny aspect.

I used the bubble wrap that the objects came in as the backdrop.  It was thrown well out of focus but nevertheless added an interesting texture to the background.  The black curtain behind gave me the grey background that I wanted with respect to Cécile’s site, although I warmed up the white balance a little so that the image wouldn’t look cold.

You can see all four images in my gallery.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Photos, Studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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