Hypnosis

This is a shot i've been meaning to try for a long time, mainly to challenge myself. Capturing a swinging watch, with proper good lighting, sharp focus, and just to top it all off - a nice difficult background that requires shallow depth of field and control of reflections This took a lot of work to get near to how i wanted it, and i'm still not entirely happy with it.

Lighting:
Table halogen lamp on the right, Flash in optical slave mode on the left, on-board flash dialled down 2 stops to add fill-in for the watch face and to trigger the optical slave. Rice-paper diffuser over the on-board flash (had to be careful to keep it out of the reflection). Second curtain sync.

Setup:
Mirror behind, tilted slightly up. Camera on tripod, remote release, mirror lockup. Shot with the glorious 100-400L IS USM at the wide end with a 6mm extension tube to let it focus close enough. Prefocused, left a mark on the table so i'd know where to swing the watch... a lot of trial and error. Nowhere near perfect, but pretty close to what i was aiming for.

Prints are available to buy at http://riot.dpcprints.com.