25 February 2009

Greyboard

As I'm starting to get into the flow of things again I thought I'd better take some WIP pics of the progress of the cherry coffee table as this one is eventually going into F&C. I had an interesting conversation some time ago with the Michael Huntley the ed about the best way of going about this sort of thing as on the face of it, it seems an quite a straight forward thing to do...whip out the camera, couple of snaps and back to work. Previous examples though, that I'd taken were full of background clutter as well as being out of focus and he said that far better pics could be shot against a plain, light grey background. He even suggested that a biggish piece of hardboard be kept specifically for that purpose and painted this light grey colour. As luck would have it, I did in fact have a reasonably big piece which I sorted out and stored on the Airpress stand but then, over the course of doing stuff in the 'shop, the task of painting it got put on the 'back burner'...a bit like the scribing gouge handle. Things change though 'cos today I was reading the current issue of F&C where there was a simple piece that had been rather well photographed and when I took another closer look at how it had been done... all the WIP shots had been taken against a light grey background. Now it takes a little bit of time these days for two and two to add up to four, but after a while, the penny dropped and I recollected my conversation with the ed. some couple of months previoulsy. Tonight then, I've been busy in the 'shop with the first coat of paint on the hardboard and I reckon I've probably got enough time tomorrow morning to put on second coat. I'm not sure if the colour I've selected is too dark so I may well look at it again at the weekend and repaint it with something a shade lighter.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If the colour is a mid-grey, it will probably also be good for taking exposure readings ;-)

Cheers,

Paul Chapman

Chris Knight said...

18% grey...

Anonymous said...

That's it Chris - 18% grey card. Kodak used to sell them but a bit of grey undercoat on a piece of hardboard works just as well. Then again, the hardboard without paint would probably give the same reading.

Cheers ;-)

Paul Chapman