Pleasing light on a reflective sphere is hard to accomplish; you can see all the light sources and reflections. Some of those spectral highlight reflections you may want and some you want to hide. I wanted to use a big blue play ball in a photograph I had in my head so I started with the blue ball on a blue pillow on a blue pad with a black background. I know from my studio fun before that ISO 100, f 5.0, 1/200 sec with my 100mm is a good place to start and That what I used in all the photographs. After looking at the pictures I would have gone to maybe f 8 but that wasn’t apparent in in-camera; more on that later. The Lights are: my Key light a Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RT in a 35” Umbrella Softbox Bounce using the on-camera Canon ST-E3-RT Speedlite Transmitter. The second is a flash slave Yongnuo YN560-IV Speedlite into a reflector and another flash slave Yongnuo YN560-IV Speedlite I move around. My camera is Canon 5DS with a Canon EF 100MM f2.8.
The first three hand held pictures are just turning on my three lights. The first is my Key light that is up and to the right you can see the nice clear reflection. The second light is my side-light into a reflector and the third is on the floor flashing up.
Next came the hard part, making adjustments by moving the lights and focusing the speed lights to hit the center of the stars. This took fifteen shots; I am new to modeling mirroring and reflection in my brain. I got rid of the reflector and focused the secondary light to the narrowest they would go. It took 13 shots and in the end my Key light was behind the ball so I didn’t have a front light. I then moved the floor flash around to the front and adjusted it to use a star in front. That took another 7 shots to it right.
