Shells a-poppin’
My wife is a big cheese in the British Shell Collectors’ Club, which is celebrating its golden anniversary this month. She asked me to photograph an assemblage of seashells for potential inclusion in their magazine. There doesn’t seem to be much orthodoxy in how shells are shot—some against a neutral background, some in situ on a beach. The aptly named @shelllphotography Instagram page mostly snaps them on a mirror against a black ground (not sure if these are actually cut out in post).
Small things like this I’ll usually photograph in a light booth, a metre-square cube with reflective inner surfaces and LED strips clipped in the frame, but I do find with shiny objects—such as shells—you can get obvious reflections of the LED strips, which Mrs Hartley was not keen on. So on this occasion I used a bulb holder on a stand with a softbox hood/umbrella that has a white gauze over the end, diffusing the light. The light is clearly only coming from one side, but this hasn’t created any hard shadows, perhaps because of the diffusion of the softbox and the reflective interior of the booth. I use the booth to photograph shiny bottles of spirits and cocktails quite a bit, so I may use this new technique more often in future.
The group of shells against the gold backdrop all have the word “gold” in their name (e.g. Golden Cowrie and Gold-Flowing Bittersweet) while against the white backdrop they are joined by other shells that are just gold in colour. You can still see a reflection from the light, but it is less distracting than the rows of LED dots.
More dramatic lighting on this earlier assemblage from May 2020, designed to inspire members of the club for a lockdown photography competition with the theme “Order and/or Disorder”.
This shell was picked up on holiday in Cornwall and is here lit just by the natural lighting coming in through the window of the cottage we were staying in, for a calm, melancholy, Dutch-interior sort of vibe.