12/52 - Techy

Techy - A Keyboard from an iMac

I found it pretty hard to come up with an idea for this weeks shot........ big surprise! I don't know how photographers doing project 365s get ideas for photographs everyday.

Since I've been using warm light for most of the photographs I've taken for this project so far, I decided to mix things up a bit and go for some cooler coloured lighting for this shot. I thought of using a CTB gel to light this keyboard and give it a "techy" sort of feel. What do you think?

Lighting info and setup shots after the jump.

Techy - Lighting setup

This was a basic two light setup. I turned the white balance on the camera to tungsten to enhance the blue light.

A Canon 430 EX II was placed on the left of camera behind the subject. It was fired at 1/64th through a CTB gel to define the edges of the keyboards and the keys.

A Canon 580 EX II was fired at 1/128th through a CTO gel from high camera right. The 580EX was zoomed to 105mm and aimed at the keyboard. The CTO gel was used to compensate for the tungsten white balance on the camera.

The New Toy - An iMac

The iMac

I've been a PC user for as long as I can remember but when I needed to upgrade my home machine, I decided to take a serious look at what Apple had to offer.  One of the main reasons for looking at a Mac was the fact that I was into photography and Macs seem to be the best platforms for post processing. Also, I had never owned or used a Mac extensively.  Read on for more info on the Mac and how I lit the shot above.

It's a completely new operating system and a whole new way of thinking. As a result it does take a bit of getting used to but it shouldn't take too long. From a post processing point of view it is fantastic to work on. The 27 inch screen makes it a lot easier to work on images and the richness of the colours on the Mac are hard to beat.

I've had a couple of problems with the machine in the three months that I've owned it. Fortunately I purchased Apple Care and was able to resolve the issues pretty quickly. The first problem I came across was using flash player. I had no problems installing it but when I visited a web site which contained a flash component, I was unable to view that section of the site. I found that the problem was caused because a user profile file had not been updated correctly. 

The second issue was a bit harder to resolve. While working on the machine the entire machine froze and a message informing me that I had to "restart the machine" appeared. This happened a couple of times and I was able to find out how to reproduce it. The issue seemed to be caused by my external hard drive which was plugged in at the time. The disk is formatted using NTFS and Macs can only read NTFS. They can't write to it.  Unplugging the external hard disk resolved this problem.

Lighting Info

I wanted to give this shot a bit of a "techy" feel.  In order to achieve this, I used a Canon 430 EX flash with a full CTB gel on it. I placed the flash behind the screen and fired it towards the camera. I used a reflector, placed camera left just out of frame, to light the front of the computer.