JuhaValimaki.com

If you have ever hit yourself with a hammer you know the feeling. I wanted to capture that feeling of hot pain in a photo. I got the idea watching our 1 year old daughter playing with a small flashlight. She was trying to eat the light and her whole mouth was lit from inside

After some experimenting I found out that I could easily light my finger from behind and have a nice red glow effect. That was the moment when the hammer idea emerged.

Developing the concept

The next step was to generate more specific ideas. Something with a hammer and my hand… I quite soon settled with the idea of hand resting on some kind of wood surface and hammer somewhere near. I knew I could quickly experiment with the composition when I had the basic lighting setup working, so I didn’t perfect the composition at this point.

Proof of concept

What I didn’t know for sure was how much output power (= amoung of light) difference I needed between thumb glow and rest of the scene. I was planning to use two studio strobes: one from under my thumb, second to light the scene. My studio strobes have only three stops of power adjustment and this might cause problems if I couldn’t make the glow bright enough relative to rest of the scene. I suspected that lighting my thumb from behind would eat much of the light simply because most of the light would never hit my thumb.

I created a 5mm (1/5″) hole to aluminium foil sheet and placed it over a strobe head. First I set exposure to 1/125s, f/8 and ISO 100. Only aperture affects exposure from strobes because the flash is anyway shorten in duration than the time shutter is open. The ambient light is contolled by both shutter speed and aperture, as usual. My selection of fast shutter speed limited light other than the flash contributing to exposure. End result is on the left. At this point I had the 500Ws studio strobe on full power.

Next I added another strobe that would light my hand. After some experimenting I found out that I could use my hand to block much of the light from hitting my thumb. That would help in keeping the glow visible. I was using about 50% power (-1 stops) at this point on the hand strobe. It looks like this might actually work!

Experimenting with composition

I happened to have some wide wooden planks available, but I needed to know where to position a hole for the thumb light. It was time to do some experiments with the composition.

After settling with rough idea of what I wanted I drilled a 5mm (1/5”) hole through the wood. I also widened the hole on the back side to guide more light to right direction.

Shooting the final image

Now it’s time to shoot the final image! I placed some books on the kitchen table, then the plank, and finally more books on top of that to balance the whole thing. The thumb light points directly up and is positioned under the hole. I also removed the modeling light (a 250W lightbulb) to allow maximum amount of light to reach my thumb. The other strobe is positioned about 1.5m (5′) from the plank and just a little higher than the plank top surface. I used hard directional light (= no softbox, umbrella etc. light softeners) to create contrast and simulate direct sunlight.

Since my left hand was not going to be available for holding the camera I used tripod. The thumb light was connected to camera with sync cord. For the other light I used optical sync (Bowens Photocell) and extension cord.

I experimented with various hand positions and adjusted light power at the same time. I noticed that the shadows were too dark, so I added a styrofoam piece just outside the frame. This way I also got a nice reflection on the chrome handle. 

Afterthoughts

The composition could be stronger. I think the thumb could be more in “thumbs up” position to really show the glow to camera. Overall scene lighting could also be lower to emphasize the glow more. Well, maybe next time

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