Photo 52 Week 3, "Chopped"

You can see the image I posted for this week's Talk Photography Photo 52 by clicking on the image to the right, but I wanted to post a little extra about it here on my regular blog, mention how I messed up, and how I could've fixed it had I enough time.

The theme this week was "Chopped", which sent quite a few ideas through my mind, most of which required a decent amount of effort to try to avoid the obvious, but I had settled on one specific image in my head.  This wasn't it. :)

My own kitchen is currently a construction site, so I decided to head over to my mother's house to take the shot.  The other reason was that I knew (or thought) she had some props there that I had in mind for the original image I wanted to make.  As it turned out, she didn't. So, I had to come up with something else and shoot it in about 10 minutes, as she was rushing me to get out of the house as she had to leave (and I'd lose my assistant holding the light too).

So, this is what I came up with.  I do like the composition and layout of it, for the most part, but the lighting definitely needs some work.  This is primarily where I screwed up.

I wanted to use a traditional wooden handled axe, but after trips to four or five different local hardware stores I couldn't find a single one that was about the size I needed.  The only wooden handled ones I saw were absolutely massive, and far too big for my mother's kitchen counter (which, as you can see from the image, just wasn't quite deep enough for what I was going for as it was).

The scene was light by just a single SB-900 from above camera right, shot through a 33" TriGrip diffuser.  If I'd had the time, I would've added a second snooted or gridded SB-900 above at the far side of the axe (flagged off from the camera to help prevent flares) pointed at the axe head in order to give it some reflection and show off a bit more of its curved shape and definition.

I might also have possibly put another snooted SB-900 camera left on the countertop throwing a very small amount of light on the back face of the axe head to help separate it a bit from the dark shadow of the countertop.

I do have a couple of other ideas for the "Chopped" theme, but there just wasn't enough time to shoot them when I did this (like I said, I didn't even have enough time to get this one right), so this is a subject I want to go back to in the future to try those out, as well as revisit this particular shot and fix the lighting.

You can follow the progress of my Photo 52 over on my Photo 52 Blog.