I should be studying - color metrics. And in a way, I am. Not the dull theory though, but trough flash photography.

A few days ago I had an idea of creating an interesting bokeh effect by using aluminium foil. It bounces off light doesn’t it? And if you wrinkle it, the reflections should be quite random. So, by taking it out of focus, it should produce some interesting results, no?

I started thinking. First of all, I need something to shoot. The foil itself would be a bit boring. And after searching my room, I found out I have a model car, just right for the job.
So, I have the subject. The background would be a wrinkled piece of aluminium foil. But the silver foil is quite dull and I needed some colour. Pros use gels to tint their light. I don’t have any gels, but I found a red plastic bag lying around. It should do. In theory, putting it over my flash should tint the light red, light would then bounce off the foil, thus making the foil look red also.
But I didn’t want the car to be red. So I would have to shoot the car with a different light. As I have only one flash, I had to wait for the night to fall, which would allow me to turn off the lights, use a long exposure and fire the same flash twice. Or three times. Maybe even more.

And so I waited …

As the night fell, I gathered some “toys”. I stole some aluminium foil from the kitchen and a dust removal product from the bathroom. To clean the car, obviously. But as I’m not an experienced cleaner, I didn’t do a very good job. Go figure. Good thing we have Photoshop.

I set everything up. Put a camera on a tripod, car on a box covered with aluminium foil and taped some more aluminium foil on the wall. For the background. I did some test shots to set up a nice composition and then some more (a lot more) to set up the lighting. I ended up having 3 lights - my flash, an iPod and an lcd screen. Flash as main light, shot a couple of times from different positions and iPod and the lcd for some fill light. And I could set the power of each of them separately to balance the light.

In the end, I came up with this:

It’s not perfect, but all in all, I quite like it. It’s “different”.

You can read my final lighting set up on the flickr page.