Class assignment: shoot a still photo that demonstrates a knowledge of basic composition, most notably rule of thirds. Bonus points for blending warm and cool colors.

If you ever wonder, an image like this takes me... let's see, I started on it around 8:30p, it's now 1:46a, so, about six hours? Tweaking lights, tweaking settings, tweaking lights again. This shot had seven lights, that's a lot of tweaking. Only about an hour spent in post, selecting the best shot of about 150 and bringing out detail. All the "magic" of this shot was done on set.

The object is a little figurine carved out of "sun obsidian". It's a mostly dark rock that's just barely translucent, with golden flecks just below the surface. So here I lit it with a cool fill light and a very warm key. And by warm I mean warm. My white balance was set to the lowest the camera could go, a deep blue-green gel was over the main fill, and about 6 cuts of 1/2 CTO over the key light.

Love it or hate it, find it spiffy or boring, I think it shows a measure of technical precision that I'm not embarrassed to present to my classmates.