Concentrating Light

This short exercise involved using a snoot to concentrate the light source in order to bring attention to a particular part of the scene. For this I set up a simple still life using a small model piano I have, standing on white paper. I rolled and taped some black card up into a tube that would just fit over the bulb over the lamp, then held this in place manually while taking some images, experimenting with placement of the light, the subject and the camera. I wanted everything outside of the spotlight to be cast into darkness, so underexposed the image by over two stops on the camera. The undiffused light source also cast a nice strong shadow to give extra drama to the image. In lightroom, I darkened the shadows further (there was some ambient light still coming through the closed blinds on the window) and increased the highlight to compensate for the underexposure. For some reason there was also a slight blue tinge to the spotlight, which I also removed. The final image is shown below, which I think demonstrates the use of a snoot quite nicely. The circle of light is not quite perfectly round as the snoot was homemade and cobbled together. Placement of the light source itself I found was important, as it did have to be pretty much directly overhead to get this 'spotlight' effect.

70mm, f/8, 1/13s, ISO 200, -2 1/3 EV