Bill Creighton of Oak Park's Stillwater Creative Group had the task of making a fairly vanilla piece of industrial equipment look a bit flashier and still fit in with the existing series of brochures. We had settled upon a color scheme of deep reds and blues some time ago, with all new photography carrying this theme.
This grinder, however, presented a challenge in that the closeup shot would have no red LEDs or blue painted surfaces to key the colors as we had before. Luckily, the grinder mechanism itself was a beautiful piece of machined stainless steel that simultaneously sent the message of "Watchlike precision" and "Don't even think of putting your hands in here!"
I decided to simply light the metal with colored gels over the strobes and let the grain of the stainless carry the reflections where it would. Moving in very close with a 20mm lens on the new digital Kodak 14n, we made a series of 38MB high resolution captures which could be immediately diplayed on the laptop and shown to the client. In very short order, what started out to be the toughest part of the shoot became a simple, satisfying photograph that worked on all levels.
