Out, out brief candle!

It was back to photographing in my studio yesterday for the first time since my operation. We kept things simple by warming up with still life shoots for the first week. My first photo was a redo of an image I had taken about a month ago of a lit candle and some old books. When I examined the photo later and realized that one of the books was a volume of Shakespeare plays, I thought it would be more appropriate to have the candle just extinguished with smoke rising from it, a reminder of the famous "Out, out brief candle!" passage from Macbeth.

I repeated the take several times in an effort to capture an interesting sculptural form in the rising smoke, and lucked out when on one take the glowing ember on the candle wick lasted long enough to appear in a few frames. The photo was taken with a Nikon D810 so the resolution is very high. I wanted the sharpness and deep coloring of the image to be reminiscent of an old Dutch still life painting. I used the Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens, which I like because of its shorter focal length.

A high res version can be downloaded with the link below the photo.

Click here to download a high res version of this image.