Strawberry Milk Creates Fine Art Still Life Photography
Fine Art Still Life Photography is one way in which I can really let my creative side loose. I love to take things that I see everyday and use my photography to transform them into something else entirely! A bright red strawberry falling into a spoonful of milk against a blue background were my vision when I thought about how to make strawberry milk!
Strawberry Milk
To start off, let me say that it is amazing how much of a mess you can create with one strawberry and a spoonful of milk while trying to create a little art! It is actually pretty impressive! It looks pretty simple and straightforward, but it ended up taking a few more tries then I would have expected. The technical side is pretty easy, the key is to be patient to get the timing on the money. In this case my still life was actually moving pretty quickly! And remember to cover everything in plastic, cause every time that strawberry hits the spoon full of milk, that milk is going to splash everywhere.
The first thing that I did was to mount my camera with my 100mm macro lens on a tripod. Next is to use a simple wood clamp to hold a kitchen spoon to a boom arm, and place the strawberry on the spoon. I then set the camera to manual focus, and focused on the strawberry. An aperture of f/8.0 gave me enough depth of field. ISO 100 works fine, and shooting at 1/200th of a second kills the ambient light completely. Without the flash, the shot was all black, exactly what I wanted! In a shot like this it is NOT the shutter speed that freezes the action – with the 580EXII Speedlite at 1/16th power the flash duration is about 1/15,000 of a second, and that is more than fast enough to freeze our strawberry and its little splash of milk!
Now that we have the basic camera and subject arranged, we need to add our lighting. I used a Canon 580EXII on a light stand, fired into a shoot through umbrella on camera left, about 1 foot away from the strawberry. The flash was set in manual mode at 1/16th power, and triggered by a radio trigger. I added a 2 foot by 2 foot piece of white foam core camera right to fill in some of the shadow on the green leafs of the strawberry. If you don’t have any foam core, run to your local office supply store and pick some up. It is super cheap, and it is really handy to have in so many situations. A few quick shots, and I was happy with the how the strawberry was looking, but I needed to do something about the background.
A plain white wall is fine, but kind of boring, so I wanted to pop some color in there. Easy enough to do it in post, but why Photoshop it, if we can get what we want in the camera, right? Right! Besides, we won’t have time to play around on the computer, we need all of our free time to clean the mess that we are going to make in the next step! So I added a second flash, this one pointed directly at the wall. Set it on 1/16 power, and add a Roscoe #80 primary blue gel, and now we have a blue wall! It is these simple steps that transform an ordinary photograph and turn it into something special, and for me that is what fine art still life photography is all about!
Okay, so we have the lights, we have the camera, we need to add a little bit of action. Simply fill the spoon with milk, drop the strawberry, and click the shutter (using a cable release, or a wireless shutter release will make this a LOT easier). This will take you several tries before you get the shot you really want. You’ll miss the spoon entirely at least once! You are also going to click the shutter too late, so that you only have a photograph of a strawberry sitting on a spoon, and too early so that you end up with a strawberry falling towards the spoon of milk. Don’t give up! You will get the photograph, and it’ll feel great when you do!
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you’ll take a few moments to check out the rest of my photography in my Fine Art galleries here on the site!