Almost Done...

These two classes have been a total pain in my ass for the past eight weeks, but at last, I am almost to the end of the road.

Two books soon to be on sale on Amazon. Shot with SB-600 on remote with homemade snoot. No post-processing except B/W conversion and cropping. Details below.

Similar shot of books in color. No color correction on PS, just cropping. Details below.

Behind the shots:

So, I wanted to make a plain picture of two books a little more interesting. Emphasis on a little. This isn't exactly very stimulating, I apologize. Anyway, First, I set up my SB-600 on my light stand and set the flash head to 85mm to narrow the beam of light. Next, I set the controls on my commander pop-up flash on the D300 and set the flash to go off at 1/64 power. Test shot. Horrible! Yikes!

I realized that the beam was still flooding out and covering the entire frame, so I needed a snoot to narrow it. Luckily, I finished a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch earlier today, so I cut up the box and made a crude snoot and taped it to the end of the flash. I wanted the edges to fade to blue for more color effect, so I put a warming gel on the flash to balance what I needed to do with the White Balance of the shot.

After a few minutes of adjustments in shutter and aperture, I settled with 1/320 at f/6.3, ISO 200. Since I used the snoot, I was able to get a nice gradiated edge on the light source without using Photoshop's vignetting darken feature. No cheating here.

Here is a wide shot of my quick set-up. Took about 30 seconds.

Note the cut up box taped as a snoot on the flash head. Also note the closet doors in the background. Exceptional closet space, I must say.

Since my classes are over this week, I hope to get back to shooting. Hopefully there will be some cooler posts than me being bored and shooting these books.

Good night