Black

If you’ve read my last article, and maybe even followed the links and read the comments, you know that I’m working towards getting deeper, richer blacks. One way in trying to get there was to switch my little E-PL1 “Pen” camera to the AdobeRGB colour space to get a wider colour gamut to start with. And I realized that I never tried that with my E-520 DSLR, so I had to take some new photos to go on playing with that.

Looking around for black objects was easy: I was practically sitting on one – my motorcycle jacket was hanging off my chair all the time. So I decided to make that my subject matter, and to make things even more interesting, I changed my bigger 5-way reflector to its dark side as well to use this as a background. To restrict the light to only illuminate the subject matter and not the background, I mounted my grid to my studio flash and hung the jacket onto one of my other light stands which carries a softbox for my compact flash. So the setup looked like this:

Then, after setting my camera to AdobeRGB, I measured an aperture of f=10, and started with a detail shot:

I also took a more or less complete photo of the front of that jacket:

Voilà – black. The workflow was the same like in my comment in my last article, with using RawTherapee on 64 bit Linux only. And again, those blacks are really ’000000′ black, at least in the luminance and ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves.

So the next step will be to try the same with some coloured objects that really ‘pop’ because those blacks are black. But if you watch this on some black background like the one on Flickriver for example, you should get the idea with these already. Viewed there, I even like my setup shot.

Oh, and by the way: those room lights and the modeling light of my studio flash were turned on while making those photos – so everything really looked like in that setup shot above. That’s one of the nice things when using flash: that it is so much more powerful that you can completely ignore those permanent lights… but those are still nice to have, and not only for focusing

Thanks for viewing.