Salad
It has been a while since I have posted here, life has just been a bit on the busy side. I am still keeping busy, and hope to get caught up with my posting over the next couple of days.
Project52’s latest assignment, number 8, was to shoot the ingredients for a salad. Sounds simple: pick your favorite salad recipe, gather then ingredients and then shoot them on an all white background. The folks who are participating in this project did an amazing job, check out the shots that folks did for this assignment on the Flickr thread.
I really enjoyed this assignment, and I tried to put a lot of work into the composition of the image, and paying attention to the details. What details? The little ones, the ones that really count, and I think make a difference. Things like “Does the pepper have a bruise?”, “Are these cherry tomatoes the right color red, are the leaves on top green and fresh looking?”. In that regard I am very pleased with the results of the assignment.
On the down side I am not happy with how the lighting worked. My setup was as follows:
- 580 EXII at 1/8th power, 24mm, with a shoot thru umbrella camera right and above.
- SB-28 at 1/16th power, 24mm bare against a white background
- White card to the left and to the front of the subject.
So what don’t I like about the lighting? Take a look at the left side of the image. You can clearly see the line created where the white Plexiglas that the items sit on meets the white bed sheet that I have hanging in the background. I should have used the bed sheet as if it was a piece of white seamless paper to eliminate the seam altogether. The second problem is with the specular highlights on the 2 glass bottles. They are small, round and hard. A softer, square shaped specular would have looked much nicer. I should have used my softbox and brought it in much, much closer then I had the umbrella. A closer light source is a softer light source, and that would have made the bottles look much nice.
As always, this was a great assignment, and I have learned several new things! If you want to see my progress during this project you can check out all of the images is my Project52 Flickr Set.
Thanks for stopping by!