I'm a member of an advanced photography training community. My mentor creates challenges to help demonstrate certain concepts.
This one required shooting a pop-art-style egg photo to show how specular highlights change with hard and soft light.
This was the example image I was to emulate.
A specular highlight is just a direct reflection of the light source.
With hard light, specular highlights are perceived as brighter. To get hard light, the light source must be smaller (or more distant). So the reflection is smaller, but also more concentrated in intensity.
With soft light, the light source is much larger (or closer). So the intensity of the reflection is spread out over a larger area. So it is perceived as dimmer.
Think about looking directly at a flashlight versus shining it against the wall. The same number of photons are involved, but your experience of them is vastly different.
If you are shooting someone with glasses and the light is reflecting brightly, you can move your light much closer to reduce its apparent intensity.
I worked for 10 minutes at a time over a period of 4 days. I got some fake eggs so I wouldn't have to spend energy cooking. Frustratingly, they arrived with a matte finish. They would not take on a specular highlight at all. So I ordered some automotive clear coat and sprayed the fake eggs on my deck.
You may have noticed my context-less egg art on my deck railing in another post. It was drying in the sun.
The clear coat worked well, so I proceeded to glue the egg to some colored construction paper and tape it to the wall in my kitchen.
I don't have a top-down rig to shoot things from above, so I felt this was a creative and low-energy solution.
A bonus aspect of the challenge was to create a Photoshop composite in which I retain the shadows from the hard light example and the gradient specular highlight on the egg yolk. I can't decide if I like that or the soft light version better.
It feels nice to have accomplished something creative. I am struggling so much with boredom as I recover. And doing anything productive is physically challenging. But I've got my birds and now my egg.
I'm making art again and that is really helping.
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