Floating Coin

I had some time to kill and found myself lovingly caressing and fondling my camera equipment as I tend to do. I have been plotting and planning a lot lately about how to light my dining room to give me the most flexibility when I shoot, as I am becoming less a fan of flash studio photography the more I do it. I don't mean using the creative lighting system strobes remotely; I mean having a flash on the camera when I shoot. I feel it's very limiting and some times difficult to deal with, especially when I'm shooting a reflective surface.

I decided to mess around with some quickly set up props and one of the photos that resulted is the coin seen here. I was using the on camera flash (I didn't feel like hauling out the SB-900), and I shot the coin on a white piece of paper. Normally I hate using the on-camera flash for macro because the 105mm lens is just long enough to get in the way of the light, depending on how close I am to the subject and the angle at which I'm shooting it. The SB-900 doesn't have this problem as it is about six feet high off the top of the camera when mounted (a slight exaggeration).

The on-camera flash gave me an interesting effect this time so it all worked out. the light bounced off the white paper and back up at the coin (a 2010 Canadian Navy Anniversary commemorative Loonie), which cast a dark shadow on the coin's surface. A little tweaking in Photoshop blew the paper out almost completely, leaving the coin with an eerie floating optical illusion.

It floats, it floats!

© Jeremy Buehler and Bug Noir (www.bugnoir.com), 2010.