Tag Archives: Still Life

Food, Photography, Still Life

Happy Valentine’s Day – Chocolate Lovers

I’m not sure where the connection between Valentine’s Day and chocolate comes from… Does it really matter?  Just be sure to enjoy some today!

I took this photo on my kitchen table, using natural light. I placed a large diffuser just out of the frame to the right of the plate. I then positioned a large white bounce card to the left of the plate. To capture the largest depth-of-field (front to back in focus) I set the 100mm macro lens to the smallest aperture it was capable of (highest f-stop number): f/32. With the camera’s ISO setting of 100, my handheld light meter told me that the proper exposure would be obtained with the shutter set to be open for 8 seconds.

Still Life

Some Joker with a Knife

2 Comments

This is a Royal Flush gambling with some Joker with a knife, with the fuel of alcohol nearby….

Shot on my kitchen table, using a black velour fabric for the background. The only light was from a northeast-facing window to the right of the camera, and thankfully if was overcast late that morning. At first, I had bounce card on the left, but it took some of the mystery of the shadows away. I ended up putting a black flag on the left to absorb the light and prevent any light from bouncing back onto the scene.

I used a handheld Sekonic light meter, set the camera to manual mode with as small of an aperture opening as this zoom lens had.
I also used a ColorChecker Passport to set a custom white balance in the camera. The only post processing that I did (in Lightroom) was to remove a few dozen white dust specs from the black velour.

ISO 100
3.2 seconds
f/22
80mm