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!!

[Tips] Shooting Sakura at Night

A short trip to Tokyo again. Walk around Asakusa(浅草) and Ueno(上野) before coming back. Will write a more details post when I'm free. So now just want to share some photo tips in this entry.

Japanese love sakura so much that after the sun goes down, they will light up the flowers and have another round of hanami(花見). Normally tungsten light bulb is used and cast a yellowish color over the flowers. Nowadays, camera built-in auto white balance is good enough to help you get the right color, or you can change it to tungsten mood or even take a grey card to make sure you will get 100% neutral light. And the result will be the same with the sakura taken in day-time. Or maybe a little bit yellowish like the one bellow taken using auto-WB.

Not a bad shot right? Personally I like it too. But why don't we go one more step further to be more creative? And this is where the tip come into action. Turned the WB to fluorescent. And guess what, you will get a purplish sakura.

You don't even need to load the photo into photoshop, all is done right inside the camera (I shot in RAW so I have done some minor adjustment)!! With just a little change to the setting, using them at unnormal circumstances, and a click, you can get another piece of art into your own collection. Remember, photography is all about adventure and trying out new things. It cost nothing in this digital world. Hope you get some new ideas before you grab your camera for another round of photo shooting. And again, thanks for stopping by. :-)