The assignment this week was color and quality of light. We had several qualities of light we could choose to shoot for the assignment, I chose low light. I was working on this assignment when I saw an amazing photo while checking out the photography blogs nominated for Bloggies this year. One of the opening photos on Canvas of Light is this amazing photo that just took my breath away. It captured my imagination and inspired me. Go ahead, go take a gander at the gorgeous photo that inspired me. I’ll wait. It’s gorgeous, right?

So back to my assignment, like I said I chose low light as my example of quality of light image for this week’s assignment. One of the suggestions for low light was candlelight so with this photo living in my head I decided to recreate it using a statue of the Blessed Mother. Two problems arose; 1. The religious goods store across the street didn’t open on Saturday, and 2. It poured all night Monday when I wanted to set up and take the photos.

So with no statue of the Blessed Mother to use I was at a loss as to what to use as the subject of my photo, I have 2 gargoyles but I wasn’t going for a dark feeling for this photograph. I have a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, but I wasn’t feeling that look either. On Sunday afternoon I stopped in the dollar store to buy tea lights for the photo shoot, 3 bags of 16 for $3.21. While we were at the dollar store we stopped in PetSmart to buy cat food and that’s where I purchased the Buddha statue, in the aquarium aisle. With the problem of what to photograph solved we made our way to Target for groceries. While in Target I bought two pieces of poster board to use as a backdrop if none of my outside ideas came to fruition.

Monday evening arrived and instead of it raining all day it rained all night, so my plans to shoot the photo on my front walkway or in my side yard were no longer an option. So I went to plan C, I set up the black poster board on my kitchen counter so my background was black and so it wouldn’t look like a photo shot on my kitchen counter. Immediately a problem arose, our smoke detector couldn’t handle all 48 of the tea lights burning at the same time. It was at this point I lost my mind and threw a tantrum.

Chuck came to my rescue and set up a card table out in the garage and so once again I set up my black poster board (so it wouldn’t look like a photo shot on a card table in a garage) and lit 48 tea lights, which is way more time consuming than one would think. I set Buddha down in the middle, went back inside and retrieved my camera and tripod and started shooting for the next two hours. The photo I turned in for my assignment is the top photo in this post.

The Details

1.  Top Photo

Shot in Aperture Priority mode

Exposure:  1/13th of a second

Aperture:  f/4.5

ISO:  100

Focal length:  60 mm (macro lens)

Exposure bias:  -1/3 EV

2.  Middle Photo

Shot in Aperture Priority mode

Exposure:  5 seconds

Aperture:  f/29.0

ISO:  100

Focal length:  60 mm (macro lens)

Exposure bias:  -2/3 EV

3.  Bottom Photo

Shot in Aperture Priority mode

Exposure:  13 seconds

Aperture:  f/29.0

ISO:  100

Focal length:  34 mm (18-55mm kit lens)

Exposure bias:  +1 EV