Playing With Light

I've been following the Lighting 102 tutorial series on Strobist, the latest installment being the Cooking Assignment. The blog is definitely a great source of information on how to use lighting equipment to illuminate a scene, though I've found it a bit challenging to translate it into concrete action with good results. But maybe that just illustrates that getting the light right in scene is far from trivial and it takes more than just a few tries to learn it.

Here are my takes on this latest assignment. I looked for various cooking utensils that were still in pristine condition such as not to ruin the shot with a scratched up knife. But to make the composition appealing, I used a nectarine to slice through. After playing around these shots were mostly taken with two Speedlight flashes, and a small photo light to the side. The slave flash provided the specular reflection on the nectarine, while the master flash was used for triggering and to provide some more ambient light. Most of these shots were taken with the macro lens, getting close in on the water droplets and the knife edge.

In terms of the assignment, I don't think I got it right. The composition looks interesting, and does feature the knife as a subject, but the specific lighting is better on the nectarine than on the knife. On the shot above, getting a nice clean reflection of the plane of the knife would make a big difference. But then, that gives me more things to practice and learn.

This shot is more interesting in terms of light, adding more light to the knife blade, and also with a blue tint which goes with the cold metal emotion. The assignments need to be taken entirely with actual lighting to capture the purpose of the tutorial. The shot on the right on the other hand is actually the same photo as above, but post-processed in Photoshop. I added a smart object layer, and then used the 'Lighting Effects' filter to add additional lighting to the image. This specific one is the blue omni setting. I modified the color from a deep blue to more metallic. I also added a layer mask to only apply the lighting effects to the knife blade and some of the water droplets on the right where the blue light would have fallen. One of the limitations of adding light effects in Photoshop is that the filter is not aware of the 3D nature of your subject - any curvature of the nectarine would not be taken into account, so care has to be taken to not create an unrealistic result.