PHOTO:First experiments with coloured light

      

 Before throwing away (at the pharmacy) some old medicines, I decided to photograph the pills.


I have two softboxes; I bought a red and a blue roll of pure vegetable cellophane (£3 each) and I made my two lights coloured.


I placed the pills on a white translucent plane (a cocoon); one light below to illuminate the background, one light on the top to illuminmate the white-ish pills.


I liked the result very much: saturated colours but no channel was clipped high.


Then I thought of shooting the pills in white light too, although I thought they would not look that nice


Well, the result of the iStock inspections, surprising for me, is that all the coloured shots were rejected while all the plain ones were accepted!


Above I have included the links to both the rejected and the accepted images, because I did them all in one session with a technique that - to me - seems similar.


The reason for the rejections was the standard "We found the overall composition of this file's lighting could be improved."


Would you say that  the way I executed the two-lights effect is poor? Or perhaps iStock is little interested, in general, in coloured light-setups?


Should you wish to look at larger images, please see here:


http://shade-of-light.com/2012/05/14/medicine-pills-and-capsules-on-istockphoto/


(they are not high-res, but I trust they are enough for judjing light, impact and composition).


Thanks!

(Edited on 2012-05-14 15:05:06 by marcoventuriniautieri)

(Edited on 2012-05-14 17:42:53 by kelvinjay)

Hi,

In order to offer any meaningful critique, we need to see the full sized images that you uploaded. Without that, trying to offer any help with technical issues is pretty pointless. Details of how to do this are in the sticky thread at the top of this forum.

Wow - they're definitely saturated shots, and offer an interesting perspective - at first glance some of them almost seem like illustrations.


I imagine the inspectors are probably thinking about their useability as stock images, if they suspect the unique lighting might limit their use or suitability, they might be chalking up the rejection to lighting in general.  


Interesting experiment nonetheless. 

Yeah, they're so overly saturated, I can't really tell what I'm looking at in the little slideshow.