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The three yeast people in the lab have recently gotten a paper accepted in Science, and wanted to use a photo of a yeast plate as the basis of some graphic art stuff to submit for a cover. Haha. That would be fun, to claim that I had shot a magazine cover, never mind that it's the cover of a scientific journal.
So the yeast people made a bunch of different plates, spelling out RNAi and the shape of a budding yeast cell, intended to go with the tagline "Uncovering RNAi in Budding Yeast." Images taken with one hotshoe flash in an umbrella at top right, and one directly fired into a blue wall up on the 7th floor of the 'head (Whitehead Institute). From a training standpoint it was a little exercise in glare and reflection control.
At least the relevant parts of the plate were basically planar, which made it a more successful lighting episode than the time I tried to light a glass coke bottle. I've heard that the way to shoot objects like, for instance, a metallic christmas ball ornament is to have a large lighting area (say, light coming through a large white bedsheet) and to have a slit in the lighting area out of which peeks the lens. That way there isn't a big nonuniform spot of of light where the source was, and the photographer does not appear in the reflection. I've never tried this.
As it turns out, Science doesn't tend to put these types of images on the cover; it's usually some sort of data photo, e.g. microscope images, or satellite images, or photos of radioactive waste dump sites, or whatnot. So it probably won't make the cover. Science also doesn't do taglines, so the joke is likely to be lost. Oh well.
