May’s photo
While the subject in the photo is obvious the technique may not be. The technique I used is light painting.
The first thing you need is a room that you can make dark and a flashlight. You may want to try a few different flashlights. A narrow beam tends to work best. You can get away with some light in the you if you need to. To test it, turn the lights off and lock the shutter open for a minute os. If the resulting photo is all black then you are set to go.
Mount your camera on a tripod with a remote release.
Composed and framed the shot.
Set the camera to manual focus and the shutter to bulb.
When you are ready to make the shot, turn off all the lights.
Lock open the shutter and paint the subject with your flashlight.
You will need to do some experimenting to determine the amount of light needed.
Give it a try and have fun.
June’s photo
April’s calendar photo
Simple one this month. A macro shot of good old fashioned Quaker Oats.
Next month the subject is obvious. But the technique used to create the image is the interesting part.
May’s photo
March’s calendar photo
March’s food item, black pepper.
I put the pepper on a sheet of glass with a black background below it. Shooting straight down with a macro lens I put strobe lights above and below the glass. That’s about all there was to it. Just work with the lighting to get a look you like.
April’s photo
February’s calendar photo
Yes, it’s a lime. The not so obvious part is the liquid it’s submerged in. In order to get the bubbles, I used club soda. The hardest part was the lighting. I wanted to use a strong backlight to show the structure of the lime. On my first try, I didn’t have enough light on the front and lost the detail in the rind. After several shots adjusting the balance between the front and back light, I produced this photo. Other then that it was simple setup. The lime was suspended in a glass container filled with club soda with a white background. The camera on a tripod with a remote release.
March’s photo
January’s calendar photo
The food item is, cooking oil.
To make this photo:
I suspended a piece of glass 8-10 inches above my desk.
Placed a glass plate on the glass.
Poured some water in the plate then added a few drops of cooking oil.
Put some colorful ribbons on the desk under the glass (anything with bright colors will work).
Mounted my camera above the plate pointing straight down.
Used a small halogen desk lamp for lighting.
100mm macro lens on my camera with a remote release.
When I do shoots like this, I like to tether to my computer. That allows me to so check my focus, which I do manually and is very critical when shooting macro.
The best thing I can tell you is to experiment. Pick a group of oil drops, focus on them, move your light source and whatever you are using for color under the glass and change you aperture to control your depth of field to get a look you like.
One of the problems I had was the imperfections in the glass plate. Later I came up with a solution for that. Instead of using a plate, I took some plumber’s putty and formed a circle with it on the glass to hold the water.
February’s photo.
My calendar
For anyone who didn’t receive one, I created a calendar to give to family and friends. All the photos are of, or have effects created using, items related to food or drink. Each month I will post that month’s photo with a description of how the photo was produced. All images were created in camera. The only changes made in post processing were sharpening and color correction. Some of the images are obvious as far as what they what they are, other are not. Next week, I will post about January’s photo shown in this post.
