This summer we had our 30th high school reunion and I was asked if I could be the official photographer for the event. A great idea, since I always like to be accomplishing something this gave a focus to have fun with. Not to mention a great excuse to point my camera at any and everybody.

My plan was to upload the pictures from the reunion to a Flickr account and that we everyone else could download pictures from the event to their heart's content. However, before that, I wanted to create an establishing picture to act as a place marker in the Flickr album. After thinking about it a bit, since I still had all my old high school year books, I thought they would do the job.

Normally I'd do a shot like this in my studio but one of my first thoughts was that really liked the idea of having bookshelves in the background and having them lay on a wooden surface. So I did the set up in my office. Though after experimenting with composing the shot I scratched the background idea. Then I worked on lighting the set up. So it all looked like this.
I cut a hole in a sheet of construction paper to tighten the focus of my light and then used my wireless remote control to fire the camera so that it would stay steady in the low light and I wouldn't mess up my composition by touching the camera. Here's the final picture.