Metal
“Metal day” first made me look for the scientific definition of the substance (any of a class of substances characterized by high electrical and thermal conductivity as well as by malleability, ductility, and high reflectivity of light - Encyclopedia Britannica). Of course I was drawn to the electrical part, which made me shoot all kinds of light bulbs in my place with, unfortunately, disappointing results. Meanwhile I was trying to think of all the metal instruments I own and also went to Caravaggio for some inspiration. I fell upon a detail from his painting The Crowning with Thorns, where a Roman Soldier is wearing a medieval armor while Jesus is getting his lovely crown. Then the idea came of using my bracelets and jewelry as an armor. I decided to use this opportunity to practice the three light set-up with off camera flash and my goal was to get a fashion magazine look. Tried it with different focal length and found that 102 mm gave a pretty good result.
I used my 60X60 cm softbox with a grid as key light, a silver reflector as fill and a second flash set to low intensity for a hair light to add some detail and set my dark hair apart from the background.
After what felt like forever I managed to get a photo without crazy eyes, with the knife reflecting some light while setting a nice shadow on the face.
In retrospect I think there’s a certain dissonance between the lighting effect I was going for and the subject of the photo, my pose, and the knife, that a clean bright lighting set up was simply not a good match for. The lighting ended up being way more dramatic and I think it fits the image better. Never-the-less I did edit the photo with fashion in mind rather than film, to practice this more beauty and product oriented look that I am less familiar with.
Here is the first edit I did, a quick lightroom edit where I put an emphasis on a cold-disaturated look and low contrast.
I then reworked the photo in photoshop, including retouch and some rethinking of the colours and came up with the photo above.
