Inspiration

Reflection Image

A portrait photo of a small toy teapot. The teapot is ceramic and primarily white. The handles and spout are pale purple with a gold border. The teapot is covered in a square pattern texture, and random sets of four squares are painted pale purple with a gold border on each square. The teapot is in the top of the frame, and it is sitting on a mirror such that its reflection is visible in the bottom of the frame. Positioned near the spout of the reflection is a large bright spot created by the reflection of a lightbulb.
18mm | 1/80 | f4.5 | ISO 4000

For this photo, we were asked to capture a reflection. I tried to do something similar for a previous photo blog, and I wasn’t very happy with how it came out, so I wanted to try again. Instead of aiming for a perfectly symmetrical image, I just wanted to capture the reflection of an object in a mirror, which was much more achievable. I placed down a small mirror I have and put various objects on top of it to capture their reflections. I think this one, featuring a toy ceramic teapot, came out the best. In Photoshop, I adjusted the lighting to make everything brighter. I also make the colors more neutral, which is important for photos such as this one that are taken inside. The most significant editing I had to do with this photo was blending/blurring out a very start and obvious glare visible in the mirror. The glare is still visible, but it looks a lot less stark than it did before because the original image had the lightbulb on my ceiling very visible. Honestly, I think it helps the composition a but because it draws attention to the reflection of the object. I would be very interested in trying something like this again, with a lot more objects.