The Queen of Fruits - Mangosteen!

Last weekend, I don't know from which part of my brain came out of this idea. Getting myself for a Mangosteen Photography session. There is one thing I must admit is... THIS FRUIT IS HARD TO SHOOT!

The skin colour of the Mangosteen is very dark in colour but the fruit itself is in white colour. It is not easy to have the light control on this fruit. You can easily have the fruit overexposed or underexposed due to the high contrast of the skin and the fruit.

And the other issue is the fruit itself is not nice. It is not as good looking as a strawberry. MUAHAHAHAHA. Forget that, just a joke. The second issue I want to bring out is, the colour of the fruit will change very fast. It will become yellowish very quickly. Just in a minute or two, you will start seeing the colour change.

This time, I have news papers as the background. Using natural light coming from the left side. After a couple oh shoots, I feel that the lights are not strong enough due to the cloudy day. My A4 paper reflector is just not enough for this situation. The light source is low, and the object very dark. So I intended to add in another light source from a Sunlight temperature light bulb to play around.

With the light bulb behind the A4 paper, playing with silhouette.

 THE QUEEN OF FRUITS! Shot with D90 + 50mm F1.8

Another shot with my D90 + 50mm f1.8 with natural light only. In this photo, we can hardly see the reflected light. Not very satisfy with this series. Have to do more research and learn how to shoot a better photo in this kind of situation. High contrast object and low light condition. There is another thing I had to admit is the composition. I need to do more homework on that as well as the light control. Do suggest me if you have a better idea. 

Cheers,

Lu Ting Jieh

Shooting fruits and water splash

This weekend, I'm trying to shoot something that I always wanted to try on it, which is the water splash. It seems to be easy, but it is not that easy to shoot when I try it myself.

As you can see from the first photo. I shoot this with my D90 + 70-200mm f2.8 VR1. An old and small fish tank, which I don't think the size is sufficient, but the thing is, it is FREE! My manager gave me that. Then you can see, I have two external flash at both side, triggered by the build in transmitter. Two A4 boxes, a stool, a drawer and a pail to support both flashes and the fish tank. And a mahjong paper as backdrop. Not a very complete setup, but these are what I have, in order to complete this shoot.



Do bare in mind, you need a few dry cloth to stand by. If there is any splash on your equipment, you can clean it off instantly. In the same time, you need a cloth to clean up the water drops on the fish tank every time before you take a shoot.

Here, I'm shooting at settings below:

Focal Length :70mm,
ISO 100,
Shutter Speed :1/200sec,
Aperture: f10.
Flash power: 1/2

I also used 1 piece of tissue placed on the right side of the fish tank to diffuse the flash. It really works for me. Huge different with tissue and without tissue. Reason that I'm using the internal flash trigger, the pop up flash is required to trigger the slave flash. So I bought one accessory, so call the "flash trigger". It is actually a pyramid shape constructed with mirrors with the pyramid head facing the pop up flash. So when the flash fires, the light does not travel directly to the object, but split to the top, side and bottom. With this, I can trigger my slave flash with the pop up flash without any lights hitting the fish tank directly.

After a couple of shoots, these are what I've got.

A single peach and the splash!

Triple peach in action!

Orange and the splash!

If you look closely at the photos, you can actually see that the lighting on the right side is much stronger than the left side. I guess the battery in the left side flash is running low.

With no doubt, I touched up the photos with Photoshop after shooting. My post processing skills are not that good, I guess people can easily see the mistake. But do make a comments or suggestion on that. No hard feelings.

Photos are not perfect, so I must have a re-shoot for the second round with a much complete equipment for setup. Basically, I personally feel that, a minimum of 3 external flashes are required for the shoot. Two on both side, same height as the water level, and one at the back to flash the backdrop. As I mentioned earlier, a larger fish tank is required.

Anyway, C & C are welcome from anyone. I'll gear up and learn more on lighting control and make the second shoot. Perhaps, I'll try more things like colored gel, different color background or different fruits/object.

=]

Cheers,
Lu Ting Jieh