Backlit Spider, by Reed A. George
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G3, Pana-Leica 45mm f2.8 Macro-Elmarit Lens
iso 1600, f2.8, 1/25 sec
I'm as bad as the next photographer about being at home, wishing I was out in the field in some exotic location, shooting pictures. However, when you're in a creative mood, it may not be necessary to travel at all.
John Gravett of
Lakeland Photographic Holidays has written a nice article about photographing common household items on ePhotoZine.
(Click Here) to read John's piece on ePhotoZine
John describes using cross-polarization to photograph transparent or translucent plastic items. The approach is to put a sheet of polarizing film on a lightbox (like the ones we used to use to view photographic slides). Next, you put the plastic item on top of the polarizing sheet. Using a second polarizer, this time a filter on your lens, you can rotate the one on the camera until it achieves an orientation of 90 degrees from the one on the light box. At that point, all polarized light coming from the lightbox will be cancelled, giving a nice black background, while light that is being bent by going through the plastic will still appear in your pictures. If you use the link above to ePhotoZine, you'll see some interesting examples.
Beyond that, John raids his kid's toybox for subjects. I've done the same before. In fact, I made a nice little photo book for my daughter, made up of closeups of her action figure toys. Those little guys look pretty badass up close!
So, don't sit and feel sorry for yourself. Get creative, and shoot what's around your home!
DMC-365.blogspot.com
DMC-365.blogspot.com
