In museum exhibitions, small artefacts such as statues and sculptures are mostly shown in precise halogen (or nowadays in LED) spot lights. Such an illumination shows the texture of the surface perfectly and detaches the subject from a possibly distracting environment.
When shooting this 19cm (7 ½ inch) statue, the goal was to imitate such an illumination while filling in the dark areas in a way, that the stone's texture becomes visible even in the dominant shadows.
In a first approach, I positioned a Picolite with a Fresnel spot attachment at an angle, which textures the stone nicely while creating dominant but non-irritating shadows. I chose a symmetrical position for this light in order to document the shape of the object as accurate as possible. The light angle was as narrow as possible and allowed to focus the light more on the face than on the "helmet".
The fill-in light was essential to show the stone's texture even in the shadows. I chose the tiny Picobox for this reason - smaller light reveals more details than oversized softboxes. As I did not want to destroy the characteristics of my main light, I positioned the Picobox just below the table. Like this its light hits the statue without illuminating the surface it is standing on.
Finally I used a 35x60 cm Softbox with textile grids on low power to illuminate the beautiful wooden background just a little bit without distracting the whole photograph.
All three lights were connected to the same power pack, a Scoro 1600 S WiFi.
I used a medium format camera at ISO100 with a 120mm macro lens. The aperture was f/22 and the shutter speed 1/125s.
© broncolor how to; photography by Urs Recher, 2020
