I've long enjoyed the “So, What the Heck is That?” column each month in The Japan Times (Japan's main English-language daily), written by Alice Gordenker. As the titles of my blog posts that reference her articles indicate, the subject can become quite wacky:

Somewhere over the years we became acquainted by email, and somehow last month I ended up doing the photography for her next column, on the decidedly non-wacky (but unexpectedly interesting) subject of Japanese candles, scheduled to appear in the paper and online next week (Update: here it is). I've been wanting to write this up this since before my new-year trip, but I'm perpetually behind.

I'll leave the many interesting details to Alice's article, but in short, the interesting points of these candles are the shape and construction method, the wick, and the material: they're not made of bee's wax. Prior to her explanation, I hadn't even known that there was any other kind of wax, and now I know that there are many, including from nuts(!)

Update: Alice now has on her blog more details about the wax and how it's made, and ends with a video showing the intensively-manual way the candles are produced. Also see this video of someone with 50 years of experience making candles, and I've posted a short followup with a few more pictures.

I have some small and insufficient experience with the “product shot” type of photograph (most recently in “Prucia Plum Wine from France” and “Failing a New Portraiture Challenge: Reflective Pottery”) so I was excited to give these candles a try. Alice had interviewed a candle maker here in Kyoto, so she arranged for me to pick up some candles from him to photograph.

The shots above are from my initial tests with the first candle (I was given a pair). To get the shape-enhancing highlights on the sides of the candle, I'd flanked it in solid white, via a dry-erase board and a large kitchen cutting board propped up by a plant pot:

After hearing back from Alice and her editor on the first set of shots, I gave it another try with the other candle. This time, rather than a dark background, I tried some very nice golden cloth-like Japanese rice paper that Stéphane Barbery had shown me while doing some portraiture practice at his house (here's one of the shots he took/processed of me).

I first set up some lighting tests with a western candle...

Then I brought in the half-used first candle for a closer-to-reality second test...

Then finally I lit the fresh candle...

Alice needed detail more than a full-body shot, but I took a few anyway for this post. I extinguished the flame and recomposed some shots in the normal room lighting:

Then back to the candle-light shot of the candle...

Except where noted, the illumination was all candle light, but in order to get even illumination, I used more than one candle. Here's the setup this time:

I used white foam-core boards on both sides and above (far enough above to be safe!) to keep as much light as possible and to provide neutral reflections. And having learned a painful lesson in reflections in the prior month's “Failing a New Portraiture Challenge: Reflective Pottery”, I made sure to have a white board clipped to the tripod, just under the camera, to avoid unsightly reflections on the front of the candle. (A black board would have been better from the shape-enhancing point of view, but I didn't have one.)

I included two western candles with relatively small flames to add additional light where the main candle's light wouldn't suffice. I had to have them very close to make them bright enough, but far enough to the side to avoid casting shadows of the candle onto the gold background.

All in all it was a fun project, and I hope the future lets me team up with Alice again.

Continued here...