Pharmacy Balance (part 1 – taking the shot)

The pharmacy balance had been originally rescued when clearing out my grandparents house. My grandfather had been a pharmacist back in the days when they used to mix the medicines themselves in a back room of a chemist shop and so a balance was a necessity. In fact clearly so important to him that he had kept them until the end of his life.

They had clearly seen better days. I am sure that they had been looked after meticulously during their working life but not so well during storage and so the brasswork was dirty and the wood veneer peeling. If there hadn’t been a sentimental value attached to them I’m sure they would have just ended up in a bin.

I had a plan to take a photograph of them that was hatched back in the middle of 2021 and so I stripped them apart completely and started what could be loosely called a restoration. With the wood polished as best as possible and the brasswork cleaned they looked acceptable and so the photograph was ready to stage.

The plan involved creating a composite photograph with the balance in one shot and a pharmacy background in another. The background shot has already been taken during my day at the museum photoshoot some months previously and so the first part of the staging was to erect a mid-grey (18%) collapsible background behind my shooting table which would make the selection of the subject easier in Photoshop later. Then I chose a marble-effect covering for the table and placed the balance on top (I guessed that a Victorian pharmacy probably had marble worktops). I also had some of the original brass weights and so I placed one of them on the ‘weight’ side of the balance and poured sugar onto the ‘sample’ side to get them to ‘balance’.

It was at this point that I realised how accurate these old balances are. It seemed that it only took a few grains of sugar for it to go from ‘too little’ to ‘too much’ and it took about 10 attempts to get the correct quantity – with an emptying and cleaning of the glass dish each time (trying to remove sugar already in the dish with a spoon left an unsightly divot in the otherwise smooth heap).

Once the balance was set-up and balanced I just had to decide on the camera height for the shot and then rotate the balance to the optimum viewing angle. With the camera tethered to a laptop the first trial shots could be taken and the power of the studio strobes adjusted to achieve an acceptable exposure. To prevent unsightly dark shadows I lit both sides with softbox diffusers.

Once the shots were taken (with a few taken at a different camera height as well) it was time to import them into Lightroom and Photoshop to create the composite. But that’s a story for another day. Here is the finished shot: