Saturday, June 28, 2008

Snooping is easy breezy

 

I’ve spent several hours today setting up my flashes (580EX and 420EX) for a food photography sessions. What I’ve learned is that most objects benefit not only from a shallow depth of field, but also from narrow, beam directed light that I was able to achieve by creating snoop adapters from cardboard. I used 2 flashes for these shots, one on camera for general fill, the other to actually backlight the object. The challenge I was faced with was balancing light patterns in the frontal section of the composition. For this purpose I’ve used a small mirror to reflect the backlight flash back onto the object from the front. The set up is fairly easy but aligning the mirror to get the proper reflection was tougher than I thought. Because there’s no pilot light on my flashes, I had to implore a pen-size LASER mounted to the top of the flash (a small flashlight could also be used) to set the mirror in the proper position (think laser sight for a sniper rifle). I don’t have the picture of the set up but I’m sure you’ve already figured it out.

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Let me know what I think of the results.

2 comments:

  1. You couldn't find "healthier" fruit, could you? :) Or was it a result of too much light/heat? :)

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  2. it was the only eatable object in my house on that Saturday :)

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