Fun with lighting + London trivia for Americans

London trivia for Americans: did you know that in London, virtually all apartments are rented furnished? On the one hand, I guess it's nice not to have to move sofas up and down tiny flights of stairs very often. But on the other, this basically means that you're constantly living with whatever the landlord decided he/she didn't want. For someone like me, who used to do interior design for a living and has just moved from a big beautiful apartment filled with things I spent years selecting and/or creating, THAT SUCKS. One interesting thing I've discovered in the process of moving abroad is that while I'm totally ok with living without my "stuff", I completely hate living with someone ELSE's "stuff". But: oh well. As Ron Burgundy would say, "when in Rome."SO. All of that was a leadin to say, we have a frosted glass dining table in our living room. Saturday morning, I was doing some yoga on the floor in the living room, when I noticed something interesting. We also have recessed lighting all around our apartment, and one of the lights is directly above the table. There were some papers sitting on the table (that's where papers go, right?) and I saw the view from underneath the table, which was really kind of awesome. (I replaced the papers with some Tibetan prayer flags I had sitting around and then crawled under the table to take this picture.)I decided to see what else I could play with. Some jewelry seemed like a nice idea:And Lefteris has this strange clear acrylic stapler, so I shot that too (laying on its side)--that was naturally a completely grayscale image, so I just messed with the white balance to get this:I love the way the texture of the glass comes through!Later that night we went to see Brad Mehldau at the Barbican--the European premiere of Highway Rider, with Joshua Redman, actually, which was suuuuper fantastic. I thought of this photo sometime around intermission, and we took it with a friend just outside a door to the Barbican. I had Lefteris hold my flash, off-camera, triggered wirelessly, standing right behind Vasilis (the model). I stood with my back to a whitish wall, so that the reflection would bounce back onto his face, and also dragged the shutter a bit, as well as using a high ISO. Here's the setup:I had some trouble getting the flash to fire, because we were outside and there was nothing for it to bounce off of. So, we bent it to 90 degrees to give it the best chance we could, and took several frames. In the end, I love it!