C.H.E.R.R.Y

Another busy week, and things will get a lot more messy for the coming weeks, until I can find a great solution for my research. ~(；＿；）／〜〜〜

So trapped in my room, all I can do to free myself from the mess - is keep doing what I enjoy the most even in limited time and space :-)

Another try on white-seamless. This time with something more adorable and tasty.

One SB-600 stuck in a softbox pointing right above the subject. And the speed light is trigle by my D300 wirelessly, on manual mode, shutter speed at 1/100 so that some ambient light from my ceiling will help whitening up the background. Aperture is set at f-13 with the strobe's power set at 1/8 if my memory serve me right. Shot at RAW, some basic cleaning, color correction and sharpening in Photoshop, and here is the result :

Cherry (さくらんぼ ). One of my favorite fruits in Japan, depends on the size and sweetness, the price can be a lot different from a few hundred to a few thousands. The one on the picture is the cheapest I can find in the local supermarket :p. "Cheery" also happend to be the title of two of my favorite song, C.H.E.R.R.Y - YUI and さくらんぼ - 大塚愛. Enjoy the song!!

Playing with light : Fruit & Vege

Is another Saturday, is another rainy day. I'm just too lazy to work on anything. Anything but playing with light. Has been following some FREE & LIVE online classes from CreativeLive recently. And one of them is from Zack Arias, about studio lighting and shooting on white seamless. So, let's try out something new that I had learnt from that class.

I've no pretty model and no proper equipments. The workaround? Scaling down. I went to the kitchen and grab whatever I can find sitting fresh in the fridge.

First, white seamless. Setting up some white paper and bed sheet as the background. With only one SB-600, I can only light-up the main object, so I let the ceiling light on and try my luck if I can get a clean white background. I got something close, but still lack about 1/2 stop of light for the background to turn pure white. At the end, I need to go into photoshop to clean the image up a bit. And here you go. Banana on white.

After the first image, I changed my mind. With one light, I want to go for more dramatic image. I changed the background to black, and some fine tuning on the exposure. I got another one, this time banana on black. Straight out of the camera.

Satisfied with the result, I went on shooting with the same setting and change the subject to tomatos and peas.

Playing with food was fun. I definitely hope that one day I will have the chance to build up my own full scale studio and taking picture on real model. By the time, food, and DIY softbox will be my friend. And I'm going to keep shooting!!

Shooting from different angle

Thanks to the power of internet, all the blogs and free resources on it. I have been picking up a lot of photography technique a little bit from here and there. I'm running a blog also, and I think I can also contribute something to the community, so here you are a little tip to help make an interesting photograph.

Here is a series of 3 photos. Can you tell what they have in common?

From a restaurant in Hiroshima during lunch time

Apple Store in Ginza, before the launching of iPad. If not the store will be much more crowded.

Inside Midtown in Roppongi. Just like the reflection, make it an interesting symmetrical view.

Easy to tell right? They all have been shot from the same angle - 90 degree form the top. Ya, is that simple!! You know what make photography interesting? Is the power of us, the photographer to present a scene in different viewpoint. How many of us will spent time looking down on something? fairly few. So present your photos, not each of them but once in a while, and that will sure attract a lot of attention. :)