It’s that time again – on January 7th, my next promo will be going out via e-mail. Response to the champagne flutes was so positive after the American Thanksgiving, that I chose it for this month’s promo.
If you’d like to get on my distribution list, please contact me. You won’t get bombarded with promos, and we definitely won’t sell or giveaway your info. And what could be nicer than getting beautiful photos of yummy food in your e-mail once every 6 weeks?
With the American holiday weekend fast approaching, it’s time to celebrate with a glass (or three) of champagne!
This is one of the few types of shots I do using entirely strobe lighting. To get the right lighting on the glasses and of a short enough duration to freeze the bubbles, the shot demands strobes. Whereas my typical natural light shots are 3 seconds or more in duration, this one was shot at 1/10th of a second, using an aperture of f/10.
One of the most deceptive things about this shot is the lights on the strings and the apparent size of the individual bulbs. The initial thinking is to use a longer exposure to make the bulbs larger, but in fact, it is determined by the aperture setting of the camera. Since I used a very long lens for this shot (210mm on medium format) and was relatively close to the set, I wasn’t worried about changing the aperture and the effect that would have on the depth of field in the shot – it was going to be shallow regardless.
Here is a diagram showing my lighting setup:
The key is to use a large light source – in this case, a very large white diffusion panel. That provides the nice lighting on the flutes – a small light source would not provide the beautiful strip of light down each side of the glasses.
It’s also important to keep the light off the string of lights – if you light them, you’ll light the string between the lights, and that’s not desirable. Seeing a bit of the string is fine, but lighting the string would look odd.
Finally, the backdrop is lit separately to show the colour of the red wreaths.
The rest is just placement of the props on the set to give a nice overall balance. The most demanding part – surprisingly, it was the metal wine bucket with the knobby handles. Getting it just right took some work.
The final image is a composite of two shots – the one exposed as seen above, and a second under-exposed, to deal with the bright speculars in the flutes that resulted from the lighting setup. The under-exposed shot is composited into this shot to “paint over” the specular areas of the glasses, bringing them back from white.
Hope you enjoyed the post – have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Wow, where has the month of August gone? Been shooting pretty constantly all month, and realized it’s been a while since my last blog entry.
On Monday of this week, I was shooting still life for Bay – she owns a company called Honey Pie Hives & Herbals out of Prince Edward County. Our day called for 6 shots – 2 more than typical, so we really had to motor through the shots.
Ruth Gangbar worked as the stylist on the shoot, with Laura Branson once again providing props, but wasn’t present for the actual shoot. I am so lucky to work with incredibly talented people.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot showing Ruth styling the honey for one of the shots – taken with my handy iPhone.
Behind-the-scenes on a still life shoot
As you can see, I was using all natural light for the shot – my preference. My strobes are great, and I really like using them, but prefer to use natural light when doing shoots like this. I was bouncing a hair of light back into the front of the shot (you can see my Hassey camera right beside Ruth’s face). I used a HUGE white sheet supported by two AutoPoles for the fill. Too close makes it too bright, and it starts to look artificial.
I was once again using the HTS on the camera – it’s a tilt-shift lens that lets me better control perspective on the set – you can see the camera looks pretty high relative to the honey, but I had a fairly aggressive down-shift on the lens, with a bit of tilt to control the depth of field. Lovin’ my new HTS – it’s an incredible tool, and the integration with Phocus (that’s the Hasselblad software that runs my camera) does an amazing job correcting the image (removing vignetting – edge of the lens starts to darken when you shift and tilt a lens).
The grip in the shot is holding the honey stir stick in just the right spot – they tend to rise up to the surface if not held in place. And hand-holding won’t work – exposures for this type of natural light shots are typically up around 3 seconds. So nothing can move.
We worked on the composition for about an hour and a half, and ended up with this shot.
Honey
Little details like the honey dripping and pooling makes the shot.
Till next post…
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