Playing with fire

So, while today was rather uneventful, with a few exceptions, I decided to call upon my trusted 5zł lightbox once more. I pondered what things I could do with it, before eventually coming up with the idea of fire! It could either be brilliant, or destroy my precious lightbox... the house too.

For the record, burning kitchen roll in an ashtray, while it's inside a cardboard box is dangerous

Smoking is undoubtedly a bad habit that many of us have. Evidently, though, there is something fascinating about cigarettes, artistically speaking. This has been documented through the thousands of photos ranging from the 1930's elegance of smoking a cigar with a top-hat and a suit to the more modern urban style.

While I'd like to say this had some deep meaning, it really doesn't. It's a cigarette burning away in an ashtray set inside my lightbox with the intention of making use of it, and seeing if I could capture the smoke (which was actually rather difficult without proper backlighting from an extrnal flash)

Here are the remains of the kitchen roll when it had finished burning and turned into smoldering ash:

Candles make for interesting subjects, especially when combined with being inside a candle-holder designed for keeping your tea warm, simply because of the shape / outlines they can create. I was always fascinated with these, particularly when looking at, for example, pumpkins with candles inside them.

Below here is a picture I took in November 2008, only a few months after breaking into dSLR photography. My series today reminded me of that era:

Succinctly, fire is great! It's very easy to manipulate, but the factor of unpredictability means that you will almost never get the same shot twice. We've all seen fire many, many times, but the flames never burn in the same way :)

LightBox project

For quite some time, I wanted to create a light box. I don't do much product-photography or in-home macro, so I have very little use for it in that sense. However, I do a lot of photography for my partner's nail company (http://zebra-nailart.blogspot.com) so I would like to have one, if only for that purpose.

Thus I began by getting a standard cardboard box, cutting off the flaps, and cutting windows into the left, right and top of the box using a Stanley knife.

After that, I took some standard oven-paper and crudely taped it (with clear cellophane tape) across all of the windows [except the top] for diffusion purposes:

Next, a standard desk lamp with a clear phillips E14 bulb pointed at the right side of the box with natural sunlight coming in from the left (it's best to use 3 lamps for perfect light dispersion but it was a quick experiment and I didn't have all the resources I needed)

A matte-black card, pushed into the box and curved (but not creased) and then, with my camera and tripod setup, I could begin to experiment