My first assignment for studio is a fruit or vegetable, using only available sunlight.
This is the result.
Not a composite, not much post processing either.
The water is from a squirt bottle. My original concept involved stopping the water much like this shot that I did last year. It appears this particular professor has a thing for starting off the year with fruit.
For this strawberry shot I used a single White Lightning strobe on a black background.
For the assignment I shot yesterday, strobes were not allowed. I figured the sun would be plenty bright and I could still get some wicked water-freezing action. Unfortunately, the available sunlight I had to work with sucked so I wasn't getting shutter speeds anywhere near fast enough. I boosted my ISO significantly (from 200 to 1250) and got a shutter speed about 1/100 sec at F/4.
Back to the orange.
My custom white balance gave me a reading pretty close to "shade" which made total sense, considering I had a big ol' diffusion screen above my orange. The fruit rendered a decent color, but because I had daylight spilling in and lighting the background - I get blue instead of black. I'm quite happy with that.
Over the course of 141 frames I sprayed it from a bunch of different angles and intensities. I shot into LightRoom3 tethered to one of the school's 27" imacs. Not a bad experience, and definitely helpful for deciding which frames had the best water spray.
The image you see on screen was my fall-back shot in case I couldn't get the water shots to come out correctly.
Post production was simple.
Decrease the brightness, warm the whole thing up, sharpen, saturate, crop.
That's that! Have a great Friday!
