October 2016 - Photography Assignment - Salt

[theantiquetiger]

It looks soft because the sides of the letters are not perfectly sharp, due to salt not being perfectly lined up.

[Barefoot]

It looks soft because the sides of the letters are not perfectly sharp, due to salt not being perfectly lined up.

That could be it. I laid the letters down first and poured the salt over them. Had to come up with a way to remove the letters and the best I could do was to stick them with a straight pin and lift them up. Just couldn't help a little spillage.

[theantiquetiger]

Thats what I mean, it maybe near impossible to get sharp edges after lifting the blocks. You may want to try spraying it with hair spray or something similar before lifting the blocks.

[theantiquetiger]

BTW, I am a science geek. It is NaCl not NaCL. Luckily "L" does not appear on the periodic table, so you may get away with it

[Barefoot]

BTW, I am a science geek. It is NaCl not NaCL. Luckily "L" does not appear on the periodic table, so you may get away with it

A thought just occurred to me. Why didn't I put the pins in the letters before I poured the salt over them? Sheesh! Now I'll have to drag everything back out for the do-over. Thanks for the info, I feel stupid.

[Marko]

Just curious - What was your shutter speed?
100% Tripod with cable release or self timer on the redo (and shoot it at F/11 or F/16) would be my recommendation.
Love to see the result for a head to head.

[Barefoot]

Just curious - What was your shutter speed?
100% Tripod with cable release or self timer on the redo (and shoot it at F/11 or F/16) would be my recommendation.
Love to see the result for a head to head.

First one was at 1/30s with a iso of 1600.

I re-shot it a day or so later, but it didn't look that much better so I elected not to post the re-do. It's a table top affair as you might imagine. My go-to tripod doesn't have a tilt feature. I suppose I could have reversed the column to hang beneath, but then I would have had to use live view (don't like live-view) for comp or taken the time and trouble to set up the a wireless connection between camera and iPad. That's a piece of cake with the a6000, but the D800 doesn't have built in wi-fi and I didn't want to deal with the extra hardware and cabling. With as much effort, or more, as the former solutions I managed to find my old Tiltall tripod (from the sixties) and the counterweight needed to use it.

When it was all set up I shot this on at f/18 with iso100 and a hint of strobe yielding a ½ sec exposure using a 3 second exposure delay mode.