Unique Lighting

The story is told that Edward Steichen once spent several months making over 1000 exposures of a simple cup and saucer in order to produce a B&W image that exhibited the entire tonal range from whitest whites to darkest blacks and confirm his belief that even the most mundane subject matter could be photographed to produce an arresting image. His experiment intrigued me, so one afternoon I brought a plain white cup and saucer into the studio and made a series of images on Tri-X film using a Nikon F3 w/an AI Nikkor 105mm f2.8 Macro Lens and a single light source (Speedotron Strobe). For this image the strobe was placed high to the left and slightly behind the subject. A reflective baffle was placed in the light path in order to cast some of the light onto the white wall of the studio. Unfortunately, none of Steichen's cup and saucer images survive to this day.