My wife gave me this beautifully detailed and eye-catching glass sculpture for Christmas called an “Endless Knot”. It was time for a challenge and I wanted to capture the entire image optically – no Photoshop effects were used here. I did some levels and curves tweaks to get exactly what I wanted from the final image. The fog is real and exposures are as shot, which made blending that much easier.

I used my Micro-Nikkor 105 on my D810 – due to the small size of the Knot, the macro lens was an easy choice. But do I shoot it high key or low key? Coloured paper background? Strobe or flash? What modifiers will I use?

Lighting anything made from glass is always a challenge. And my Endless Knot also has bright blues and greens and some highly reflective gold flecks.

Low key was my next decision – to illustrate the colours and textures and not make it look like a magical ribbon that just floated in white space.

Due to the small size of the subject, I chose flashes for lighting, in this case two Cactus RF60 wireless flashes. The Cactus system allows me to adjust the power of each flash directly from camera – I don’t have to move to each flash to adjust it individually. A second V6 on camera is both trigger and power control.

Beginning with three pieces of Black Plasticore – two angled out in a V shape sitting on top of another piece – surrounded the Knot in black.

To keep the background a deep, rich black, I wanted a low ISO (the Nikon D810’s lowest native ISO is 64 – I could have used the Lo-1 boost of ISO32, but wanted to maintain the great dynamic range).

Measuring the distance from camera to subject gave me an aperture of f16 to get the required Depth of Field to ensure sharpness from front to back on my subject, which is only 3.5 inches in diameter.

To ensure a nice, rich black background, I stopped down my lens by another 1/2 stop to f20.

The diagram to the right shows the initial setup. I’ve got my D810 and Micro-Nikkor 105 mounted to my Vanguard ABEO Pro CF tripod and GH-300T grip head. The GH-300T is a ballhead with an easy-to-use grip and a built-in shutter release so I don’t have to touch the camera, which might cause shake. This combination of head and carbon fibre tripod is very stable.

LumiQuest has a diverse collection of flash modifiers and they’ve recently introduced their UltraStrap. The UltraStrap is now used to hold modifiers on your flash instead of gluing Velcro to flash head.

For my main light, I decided on a fairly large modifier, the SoftBox LTp. The LTp really spreads the light and creates beautiful, soft shadow transitions – light falloff is very subtle. I positioned my main light camera right to reduce reflections and glare.

I had a few choices for fill, but really wanted to direct the fill into the back of the Knot to add depth and dimension. The best tool for that is a snoot and LumiQuest’s Snoot XTR is a unique and very useful modifier. It starts off as a 10° snoot, but with the exclusive Snoot ExTendeR, light can be narrowed to less than 5°!

After “eyeballing” where I wanted my lights, it was time to meter for the right exposure. As I had turned all the studio lights off, ambient light wasn’t going to be an issue – it was dark in there. Flash power and duration was going to expose this shot – not the camera shutter.

With my Gossen DigiSky meter set to ISO64 and 1/60 second, I took meter readings from the Knot and from the background. I was looking for enough light to expose for f16 on the Knot. I found that 1/83 power from my mainlight with the SoftBox LTp was perfect.

I also wanted as close to 0EV as I could get from the background. Using my meter, I could adjust the position of the background until I got as little light as possible on it. I also adjusted the angle of the LTp so less light would fall on the background.

Aiming and metering the Snoot XTR was a little trickier as where wanted to put the light wasn’t feasible to get a meter into. I had to remove the Knot and place the meter in the spot I wanted to light.

I started at the same power setting, but due to the lack of diffusion, I was getting too much light from the Snoot. Since my Gossen meter told me I was getting f36, or one full Stop more light. Using the Cactus V6, I simply pressed B and spun the dial to drop the power of the RF60 Fill light to 1/163.

With my main and fill metered, it was time for a test shot.

Overall, not bad. Nice black background, but I wasn’t thrilled with the angle of the Knot or the highlights. And it seemed a little “blah”. It need some life, some mystery.

I tried a different camera angle and spun the Knot around. Not yet.

Then I remembered the base I was using had LED lights. Batteries are great thing to keep in our camera bag! I was now mixing ambient (even though it’s still artificial) LED light with strobe.

I metered the LED light source, this time setting my meter for f11. I wanted the LED lights to be an accent only – LED alone was just a mash of colour that made the Knot unrecognizable. And metering for one full Stop less light would help ensure the LEDs didn’t take over, as my meter showed a 10 second exposure time now!

Another step to make sure the LED lights didn’t overpower the exposure was to set my camera to rear curtain sync – this fires the flash just before the shutter closes, instead of when the shutter opens. If I fired the flashes at the beginning of the exposure, the LED lights would have dominated instead of accented as they would have provided more light to the exposure.

Now I was getting somewhere. The Endless Knot was starting to look really cool, so I tried a few more angles. I didn’t like seeing the LED light source – I felt it took away from the Knot – so I lowered my camera to put it almost level with the top of the Base.

What makes things look really cool? FOG! And I had some low level fogger solution leftover from Hallowe’en! This fog is meant to stay low.

Placing the fogger in front of the Know would have blinded my camera – I needed the fog to come from behind. So I changed my setup.

I kept the Knot in the same place and set my fogger behind it. Then I bent a piece of Black Plasticore in half, with a small A clamp to hold it, and opened up the V background so the sides acted like flags to control any reflections. They also helped focus the fog.

I also knew that the LEDs would affect the look of the fog, and I wanted a natural colour to the fog. I decided to backlight the fog, this time with a Metz 64 AF-1 mounted on a Cactus V6 Wireless Flash Transceiver. I placed my Gossen meter where I hoped the fog would be, using the same settings as I did to meter my main and fill lights (ISO64, 1/60s), and adjusted my Metz down to 1/326, which gave me an f8 on the position of the fog.

I added a piece of foamcore to the top of my setup – doubling as a flag and for holding the fog in place. Now, it was simply a matter of finding the angle I wanted and getting the right amount of smoke! Here’s what the final setup looked like from the side: