Rainbow effect using a CD
- Payton Bogatch
- Dec 6, 2017
- 2 min read
Hi everyone! Let me tell you all about the quickest, yet most colorful photo shoot I've ever taken. To take these shots, I held both my phone with its flash on the back of a CD in one hand to reflect a rainbow on to the face of my model's face and shot with the other. I got this idea from photographers such as Jessica Kobeissi and Brandon Woelfel in their photography challenge videos on Jessica's Youtube. The trick is balancing the CD and your phone well in one hand, and not needing to change your settings anymore after getting the CD and phone in perfect position.
In order to compose the shots, I asked my roommate Summer to sit in the windowsill in our room with the blinds nearly shut so that the room was dark, but not dark enough so that there was no other source of light in the frame. I knew that I wanted most of these pictures to be head shots to really focus on the rainbow emphasizing Summer's face, so I used my 35mm f/1.4 lens. Once I got my settings on my camera down, I put my phone on top of the back of the CD in a way that made them rest at about a 45 degree angle, then once I was comfortable enough, I picked up my camera with my other hand and started to shoot.
In order to mix up the look of the shots and to make the best composition, it's important to twist the phone and CD combo to make the rainbow reflection compliment the model's face. Otherwise, you might end up with just a rainbow mustache or something that's just awkward looking. Also, I think the pictures looked really nice when I asked Summer to loosen up and play around with her hair and rest her face on her hands, so that she wasn't so stiff looking. Now that I have been taking pictures of more people, I find that communication with your model is very important and letting them know what to do or pretend to do in order to look less stiff is vital. Otherwise, I really loved this technique and had a hard time choosing which ones were my favorites.
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