This is the biggest, thickest, heaviest vase I've got in the house.   Like all cheap glass, and a lot of expensive crystal, it's cockeyed, skewed, crooked, twisted, and the glass itself is imperfect, the opposite of glass you find in a good lens as it was never intended for light to go through a glass vase like you want it to go through a lens.   This fact is a plus when you in fact want the light to bounce around in the glass to produce all kinds of surprises.

  Trying to line this stuff up, up/down/right/left as crooked as it all is, was always an eternal chore, but then there's the beauty of glass that keeps me coming back, particularly since it's going to be an arduous process of tracking down the right faces for my 'Black Mask' project.

Here I've laid the vase almost on its side, placed a light bulb behind the vase, w/light going throuh the bottom, reflecting off the insides of the vase, and going through the glass itself and all it's imperfections.  This is one time when the imperfections are giving me something interesting instead of a headache, and I'm loving that about this shot.

I've intersected the 'horizon with the corners of the vase because placing them anywhere else didn't look right to me because of the geometrical nature of the SM.  I did it on purpose, it wasn't a mistake.

I knew as soon as I set up the lighting and looked through the viewfinder that this lens was going to give an elegant 'touch' to what I'd set up.   Maybe it is 'projection' on my part, but a Pinkham Semi-Achromatic seemed like it was always whispering.........'You're going to have to work your ass off to get me to do anything'............................The Kodak Portrait seems to say......'We're in this together, I'll help as much as I can.  

There are some pretty bright highlights in this set-up coming 'straight down the pike', straight down the lens axis, and they don't look garish, although I must admit that a great help is that I focused on the front lip of the vase, so the highlights are behind of the best plane of focus, and are not only softened by the Kodak, but are oof.   

I don't know to what degree you call the way the illumination dispersion/refraction/reflection the way it's acting in this shot, so I discretion called for a more vague and lyrical moniker, thus the title of 'A luminous Dance'.

Take care

Postscript:  After uploading this image on Paowang, the Chinese website I'm a member of, the first comment made about it is that it looked like it was Photoshopped.   I'm uploading an additional image which is the studio set-up of the vase I used in this shot.

I cut a 'V' shape into a section of packing styro foam to hold the vase in its final orientation, and in order to keep the styrofoam toward the rear of the vase, so you could only see it's shadow, and also keep the front end of the vase off the floor, I used an 'A' clamp to weigh down the rear of the vase.  

I have a more powerful light turned on for this shot, instead of the smaller light bulb you see behind the vase which was the only light on for the final image.   Just in front of the bulb, and in between the handles of the 'A' clamp are a couple of sheets of lens cleaning cotting I used to diffuse the illumination of the lightbulb for the final image.

The front of the vase is larger than the rear area so looking through the viewfinder you can't see any of this stuff at the rear. 

As you walk around to the front of the vase, even w/this different illumination on, you can see lines/waves forming in the walls of the vase forming every few centimeters.   I believe this to be a result of the imperfect glass used in this vase causing reflections/refractions that you wouldn't see in a sheet of optically correct Schott glass.   

Anyway............it ain't me, it was the glass, just the way I Schott it.