Back in the day, almost two years ago, when newspapers and wire services assigned freelance photographers to shoot photos to accompany business stories, I often searched out photogenic subjects to best illustrate manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, and business-to-business and retail sales.
The reality of most manufacturing facilities is that they don’t look anything like what the imagination can conjure up from the company’s name and product description.
One such local company told me it was the coldest place in Ohio, building near-zero degree temperature measuring devices for other manufacturing companies. I eagerly jumped at the chance to photograph their facility for an assigned story on the economy and a federal report on manufacturing.
Sounded like a great place for a set of photos. It was, but it wasn’t what I thought it might be.
The refrigeration units, although the completed unit was sizeable, centered around an extremely small device that could barely be seen pinched between the tongs of tweezers. Although interesting, not uniquely photogenic. The sensor is 16/1000th of an inch wide. What made the photo possible was a tray of 900 of these devices soon to be installed in units.
I used two Nikon SB800 strobes and a Vivitar 283 to light the scene as one of the engineers held a sensor in tweezers.
One SB800 light was placed about three feet away at 45 degrees to my right and 45 degrees above my head pointed directly at the tray of 900 sensors.
A second SB800 light was placed at the same height about 135 degrees from my left at 45 degrees down angle. It’s angle was slightly altered to make sure its light fell between the engineer’s fingers and the blue container to create shadows from a different angle than the first light.
The third light, the Vivitar 283, was placed just to the left of and slightly above my head.
The camera, a D2X with a 60mm f2.8 macro lens, was set to manual exposure because all my light sources were from strobes and gave complete control of lighting ratios and eliminated any ambient light. Idialed in f16 to give me a greater depth of field for the array of sensors and tweezers. The strobes were fired with Pocket Wizards, not Nikon CLS. The camera was a Nikon D2X which doesn’t have a built-in strobe for command mode.
I’m sorry that I didn’t write down the exact setting for each strobe. I know that would have been very helpful. However, the light to my right was set about 1/2 stop less than the light to the far left. The left light gave me backlight for her hand and the rows of sensors. I made sure her hand’s shadow from the second strobe partially fell across the sensors creating a variety of light directions across them. The 283 was dialed down to provide a low level fill light from the front.
The greatest difficulty of the day was getting my focus point to be on the sensor in the tweezers and make sure its position was against the gray area between the rows of other sensors. It took about 15 shots before I was comfortable with the light setup and sensor positioning, then another 10 for insurance and a few different angles, none of which were successful.
I shot this and one other lighting setup in about 30 minutes in order to meet an early afternoon deadline and before the engineers left for lunch.
