I feel I am still quite young in the art of quilt photography– or the art of photography in general. Susan and LaQuita’s quilts, which I demonstrated in this video, are largely about completely flat copy. Sue Fox, however, makes largely textural quilts with simple graphic design. So I needed to add some more texture to the lighting.

I started with the same setup as the last time, two AlienBee 800’s with muslin socks and R119 diffusion over the standard 7″ reflector. Since all of Sue’s quilts have pockets, we decided to try hanging them upright, and so I needed my texture light to be at the top. The room has a white ceiling, so I wanted to try doing a pretty wide bounce on the ceiling. You can see it here:

I didn’t want the toplight spilling directly onto the quilts, so I fashioned a reflector/gobo out of white coroplast, a little better exposure of it here:

The blue bag hanging below is an external battery pack, since 4 AA batteries don’t really last through a shoot, and it’s nice to just forget about power. The idea with this light is that it evenly rakes the quilt with just a little bit of light (the bulk of the illumination is from the two AB’s in the back of the room) that tends to highlight the top of the quilted pattern. So rather than the quilting going flat, you get subtle highlights at the top of the “bubbles” from the quilting, and subtle shadows above each line of quilting. However, this doesn’t detract from the pattern of the quilt. This image is a good example:

Even at this size, you can see most of the shapes in the texture. I found a shot where I had turned off the frontlight to see what I was getting, it was very underexposed, since I was just going for a test image, but I pulled a black and white image out of it here, thus:

(Click for larger).

I think this method works pretty well– one light that can just add a little bit of definition, and two big bright lights that make sure the quilt is lit completely evenly.

An older shot I dug up. I’m going to have to reshoot this, now being about 9 months later. Oh, and there’s actually some art on the wall now.

From James Duncan Davidson, better than just watermarking.

Spent the last weekend at a beach house in Mendocino with a bunch of friends. Here, two of them, got lost in the 6 miles of sand dune north of the house. They did manage to find their way back, and I got a couple of good shots of them in route.

More pictures here. Including some aerial shots from the kite. I did manage to break the camera I was using (dropped it into the sand), so if anyone is looking to get rid of their 3MP or better point&shoot, drop me a line.