Lit Light Bulb

When browsing 500px, I stumbled on this image and I immediately wanted to try it myself. I know I needed a dimmer and a incandescent light bulb. This was harder to find than I anticipated. I didn't have a dimmer and most people I asked didn't have one either. Until one of my coworker said she had one for her salt lamp. It was a smaller socket but  at this point I didn't care. Luckily, I found some cool vintage looking light bulb with the proper socket size.

I had an idea one how to create this shot so I invited my buddy over to give it a try. Here's the setup:

So a pretty simple setup here. We clamped the dimmer on a chair and we used 2 flashes with 2 pieces of paper. We later added an extra piece of paper to create the top highlight. I don't remember the flashes setting but the right one is stronger to create an off balance.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

The main challenge is to find light bulbs scuff free which is almost impossible. We actually achieve this picture fairly quickly but there was 2 main issues.

First one is the flash reflection on top of the light bulb. To fix this, we should've used 2 rectangles diffusers with the flash behind them but I didn't have any fabricated.

Second issue is with the light bulb itself. I couldn't figure out where that weird green reflection on the right side until I edited the picture. If you look at the bottom left of the light bulb, you'll see a smudge of light green. I think that reflects back to the right side. I don't know why we didn't try another light bulb. The other light bulbs had more scratches but that would've been easier to remove in post compared to this.

I used a 4x5 crop for this picture. As for editing, I played with the basic stuff + HSL. My main concern was the element. How bright and how red I wanted it. After I was done editing in lightroom, I went into Gimp to remove the flash reflection.

This was really fun and easier than expected. Next time, I'll try with soft boxes.