Project 56

My subject for this project is a bronze statue of the Indian God Ganesha, offering plenty of relief and fine detail, it is an ideal object to work up some lighting experiments.  The only thing it lacks is colour, the whole statue is bronze.  I placed the statues against a black felt background to avoid reflections and focus attention onto the statue.

My light source is an Elinchrom D-Lite 4, 400J monoblock with a 52x52 cm softbox to modify the light.  I placed the camera to the front of the statue pointing slightly downward and the light at about a 30 degree angle away to the left.  I established the exposure using a handheld flash meter.

The first image is taken without the softbox mounted on the flash head and includes no post processing modifications:

Canon EOS 5D2, 50mm, f/9.5, 1/125s, ISO 100

I then attached the softbox and obtained the following image

Canon EOS 5D2, 50mm, f/3.5, 1/125s, ISO 100

One immediate difference was that I had to open the aperture out to f/3.5 to account for the light absorbed by the softbox.  Otherwise the effect is very much as expected, the lighting is more even and the shadows far less pronounced, all in all a much softer image.