A lot of fun setting this one up this week. I present… The Purple Duck!

So this week I got a wireless flash trigger for my camera (from the helpful folks out at Image Melbourne) – unfortunately it doesn’t support TTL (through the lens) metering, so it’s all manual here.

In this picture, the flash is set up off to the left hand side set at 1/64 power (due to the flash being so close to the duck), 35mm (slightly wide, but not too wide) and pointed at the wall behind the duck.

Camera itself was set up on a tripod with my home-made wired trigger attached to it. Lens at a nice safe f/8 and zoomed out to 70mm.

A couple of drops of soap were put in the water to break surface tension to help me position the duck (not sure if this actually helped or not), from there, I used 4 skewers on the glass to centralise the duck, then another skewer to rotate it to face forwards. Once the duck settled, the skewers were removed (this was quite annoying as one bump on the duck and the whole thing had to be set up again).

Finally while I was using the wired trigger I held a reflector above the duck to fill in the shadow on the right hand side of the face. This didn’t really help too much as I pretty much brought most of the detail back in via Lightroom (using the fill light slider).

Overall I’m really happy with this picture. Originally I wasn’t going to do it in a “high key” style, but the flash wouldn’t go any darker (would have to move it further away to get it any darker), and after looking at the resulting image, I liked how it looked.

As for criticisms, would have been nice to get the duck facing directly forwards, but my hands weren’t steady enough to quite get it there. A seamless background would have been nice too, but I don’t have a large enough piece of paper to do that with. Also, the bubbles under the duck would have been nice to remove, but it’s probably the smallest issue here (farting duck maybe?).