Still Life #2- Food

This weekend I created still life shots using fruits and veggies with unique textures and bright colors. I discovered there is a lot to think about when using food as a subject. It's important to decide what kind of shots you're going to take before cutting anything and it's best to choose foods that don't brown easily.

Before shooting I read through my camera manual again, taking notes and jotting down quick tips. I'm getting comfortable understanding what ISO settings to use under what conditions but today I had trouble with the focus setup. My camera was set to "Program" mode but as I was playing around I did something to adjust the "Focus Lock" setting.  I didn't realize I had done this until I started shooting and couldn't get the camera to focus. I went back through the manual and think it had something to do with having the "AE Lock" set to Off but this is something I'll need to address with my teacher next week because I'm not exactly sure I fixed it.

To setup my still life I chose to use a large bay window in our house to provide the natural light. I started shooting around noon. One thing that was difficult was finding an angle to shoot that didn't cast a shadow on the subject. I used a tripod for this shoot because I intended to shoot extremely close. The tripod was helpful although it was difficult positioning it to get the angle I wanted- hopefully with more practice setting up the tripod will be less cumbersome.

Below are the images that were shot. I wanted to crop in close so that the texture and details of the fruit were crisp and exaggerated. The image seemed to look exactly the same with the ISO set to 200 or 800 although after opening in Photoshop I realized 800 was not necessary. When zoomed in on the ISO800 shots you'll notice the image is a bit grainy.

I used most of the following adjustments to create the finished photos:

• Increase exposure to +.95
• Increased blacks from 5 to 10
• Increased brightness from 50-56
• Increased contrast from 25-45
• Increased clarity to +7
• Decreased Vibrance to -5
• Decreased saturation to -4
• Increased Tone Curve very slightly
• Increased Sharpening from 25 to 30
• Shadows decreased tint to -16
• Decreased Red hue to -30
• Decreased Green hue to -5
• Increased Green saturation to +15
• Increased Blue to +11
• Increased Blue Saturation to +23

After these adjustments the Kiwi image looked like this:

To enhance the kiwi texture and give it a slimy-wet look I created a duplicate layer in Photoshop and applied a "Plastic Wrap" filter which made the photo look like this:

Next I moved the "slimy" layer to the bottom and began erasing (eraser at 48%) the original image to let some of the highlights from the plastic wrap filter show through. The end result was pretty neat:

This technique seemed to work well to achieve the look of a freshly cut piece of fruit so I edited the following photos using the same process and plastic wrap filter.

 

Before Editing

 After Editing