Making The Shot #1: Replenishing The Fruit Colors

I was asked recently how some of my shots were photographed. And often the most popular are the ones from the Fresh Series. Thanks to my fellow friends at Feedmelah.com, I had this shot posted in their blog and thus more publicity! So in any case, this will be a first in a series of “Making The Shots” posts where I’ll give it a go at explaining how I did one of my previous shots. I’ll do my very best and hopefully you will be able to try it on your own too! I’d definitely be interested in seeing how you managed with the guide I’ve provided, not to mention the results you got in the end, so do feel free to share =)

Alright, so what do you need:

1. Fresh fruits
2. A wine glass
3. Camera with kit lens
4. Flash which can be fired off-camera
5. Water
6. A white wall
7. Patience and perseverance + the willingness to wipe the spilled water and try, try again.

Now, as you can see from my little hand drawn diagram (inspired by Joe McNally and yes, I know I can’t draw digitally to save my life), the key to making the shot is getting the flash off-camera. There are plenty of resources on how to get this done, the most notable being the Strobist community. David Hobby has started what I can only call a real phenomenon and I am forever thankful to him for making the masses (myself included) aware of the beauty of off-camera flash. Anyway, I digress.

The reason the flash is fired at the white wall is so that the latter can act as a bigger, and softer diffused light, rather than the harsh one generated from a directly fired flash. Do keep in mind as well, that this shot was done back in late 2007, so I’m pretty sure I would do it differently today with the amount of knowledge and experience acquired since.

I first set the camera to manual mode, and set the aperture to f/8.0, the shutter speed to 1/160 sec and zoomed in a fair bit to about 40 mm. Note that there is really no right or wrong way of doing this. Just as long as you know WHY you are doing it, that’s all that matters. In my case, I set the lens aperture to f/8.0 so that I could achieve lighting solely from the flash rather than the ambient light (eg. sunlight) without letting the shutter speed go any faster than 1/160 sec at ISO 100.* Now that will be a mouthful for those unfamiliar with the terms I used. 40mm was set, well just because… because I needed to zoom in-lah =)

*By increasing the f-stop number, less light will be able to come in. Setting the camera to ISO 100 also reduces light coming into the camera. This means that the flash will become the MAIN source of light. The eBay triggers have a highest sync speed of 1/200 sec (if you are lucky). I put it to 1/160 sec just so that I don’t have to worry about camera shake, and thus be able to obtain a sharp shot even though it’s on a wobbly surface.

Then, I powered up the flash and fired it in Manual mode at about 1/16.

And yes, it took many attempts. In fact, I had to empty the glass and wipe the droplets away from the sides quite a number of times before I nailed it. Handy use of the towels too, I might add.

And then comes the processing. Shot the image in RAW, sent it into Lightroom. Did a couple of exposure and highlight adjustments. Added a touch of vignetting, and that’s it.

One Fresh Series shot completed. Easy, no? Try it yourself!