tips on shooting reflections

[Anderson]

Boy!! I don't know!! Usually, it is what you see is what you get with reflections!! Did you remember to take off your polarizer??

Barry

[flash]

Was it possible that you may have focussed on the door and not the reflection?

Gordon

[kipp]

the difference is focal plane is interesting and may well be the cause.  

i often have difficulty focusing -- i use contax manual 35 mm gear, and i may have focused too far out or too close in.   in the future, i perhaps should take several exposures varying the focus (i already do this in my macro work....)

thanks, kipp

[kipp]

i have found shooting reflected images off of mirrors/glass and, to a lesser extent, water to be difficult in the sense that what my slide ends up as is far different from what i had burned in my memory during the shoot

specifically, on my last attempt i had tried to shoot a seaside reflection off of a glass door (at roughly a 45 degree angle).    i set up with a tripod and cable release, and was darned sure that the dominant view from my/camera vantage was a striking (blue/green) sea reflected off of the glass.  when i got the slide developed, the dominant effect seemed to have been one of looking through the glass door to the other side as opposed to capturing a reflection -- there was a mixture of that plus reflection which made the slide very difficult to clearly make sense of

understand this may be sketchy on details, and perhaps i should post an image, but in general how have others optimized results when shooting reflections

thanks, kipp

[kipp]

actually....i may have left the polarizer on..but highly doubt it...

-kipp

[Jonathan Wienke]

That is a tricky part about photographing reflections, the focal plane of the reflection itself is always much farther away that the reflective medium (water, glass, miror, etc.). If the reflective medium has texture, such as water with ripples, then the autofocus may focus on the reflective medium rather than the reflection.