You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time...

A few years ago I put today's image into a competition. It had a theme of "reflections". I attended the show to see how the print would do. When it came up in the lightbox a couple of the judges got up, walked up to the print and obviously spent some looking at the wine glass. Apparently they were "looking" for the reflection. I don't know what they were thinking, but all I could do is remember the old adage "can't see the forest for the trees". There is a reflection in the wine glass, but the fact that the entire image is a reflection seemed to escape them. While they were studying the glass they missed the writing on the bottle being backwards. Also, on the subject of the glass, the shape itself should have been some kind of hint. Maybe the biggest clue was the fact that the surface of the wine in the glass is on about a thirty degree slant. Whatever it was, they miss read the image by a mile. I had to smile (or maybe smirk) when they returned to their seats and scored the image. I find it sort of amazing that some people try to find something hard, where the observable is easy. I've seen this same type of thing in areas other than photography. People get to the point where they have, what they feel, is the answer they were looking for and stop. They don't ask the follow up question. The one that's critical to the success of operation at hand. I used to work for a company that would come out with the most amazing products, because they "could". I don't think they ever asked themselves if they "should". I was listening to the radio in the car on the way to a gig several years back. The show was a technology call-in talk show, specializing in computers. They just read about a new technology and were howling about what a dumb idea it was. No one would ever get into this, they said. They went on and on about how useless the "add-on" to a common devise was. Because of the position I had at a cutting edge (and I mean bleeding edge) company I knew the piece would gain wide acceptance fairly quickly. I haven't run into the hosts in several years. I had "appeared" on their show shortly before this episode. I am willing to bet that both hosts now own the common device with the add-on. Mainly because it's hard to find a cell phone without a camera in it today. Another example of not being able to "see the forest". Today's image is pretty easy to do. If you'd like to check out the technique, hit the "read more".

Today's image is not a shot of a glass of wine and the bottle. It's a shot of the reflection of the glass and bottle. Mylar was hung from a background stand and the still-life was setup the opposite way around. The only remaining question was how to light it. As it would up, the flash was shot into the Mylar. It lit up the scene nicely. The gold background was my wife holding up a gold colored blanket while I shot it from an angle.


Remember, sometimes the answer is easy. Don't make things any more difficult than it has to be.