The Story Behind the Photo

December 2022: Best of 2022

The Spectral Tea Party by Michelle Ray

One day last September I was feeling creative, and needed to test some Rotolights Roger was offering to sell. I had seen two images on Instagram that day that caught my attention. The first was food, plates, and eating utensils apparently levitating in mid air, and the second was a lantern set on the ground looking all mysterious. With Spooky season right around the corner, it seemed like I could use some household objects and come up with something similar, but different.

The setting was crucial to the success of this photo, and I decided to use a corner of the yard that features a Japanese Maple tree, with a fence behind it. The tree had a branch with a natural inverted “v” shape that I thought might be useful for framing objects. The sun was setting behind the fence, and I didn’t like the way the slatted fence looked all backlit, so I dragged out a backdrop and set it against the fence, using a rock to keep it upright. Some LED lights were strung low on the backdrop to create bokeh.
This is what it looked like.

I used one Rotolight to illuminate the backdrop, and one to illuminate the subjects. The objects had a tendency to reflect light, so I ended up lighting them from the side, or behind. The subjects included old bottles, a clock, and a teapot with matching cup and saucer, and various flowers from my garden.
My tripod would not go low enough, and setting the camera directly on the ground was too low, so I had to improvise. Eventually, I inverted a flower pot, and used several flat stones to level out the camera. The timer was used to avoid camera movement.
Several photos of just the lights and backdrop with and without the tree were taken for possible use in other compositional photos, should the need arise.

The tree also allowed me to use some fishing line to suspend the teapot, although filling the teapot with hot water was too much for the line and it eventually broke, sending my teapot crashing to the ground and breaking in half.
A very large aperture yielded a shallow depth of field for these photos, and in hindsight, I wish I had taken more than one photo and stacked them, so the Dahlias would have been in focus completely.

A few more examples from the same shoot.