Yum

Think I've already used that title...but whatever. It's fitting so it stays.

Obviously, this post is about food. Why else would I title it "yum?" I went shopping today, and so I'm loaded up with all sorts of delicious food. Can't wait for breakfast, either going to be cereal, yogurt and fruit, or oatmeal and fruit. Or maybe eggs. Or maybe rice cakes and fruit and peanut butter. oh the choices.

But tonight, I wanted to try out this interesting style of lighting that combined hard light and on axis light. I read about it years ago on Stobist, but I don't think I've ever had enough lights to try it! Until now...Alex has the same lights as me, so I borrowed his and set something up.

I used raisins as my subject, mostly because I'd tried a lens and that hadn't worked at all. The shot that David Hobby got was on a cutting board and it was food,  so I substituted by own food and also used a cutting board. Worked out very well.

To start, I turned on one light at a time. First was a soft box on one corner at 1/16 power. That is underexposed for shooting at f16, but I'll explain that later. With a lot of lights, there's a lot of light.

Next I turned on two hard lights. One opposite the soft box, and one in between on the other other corner. These were both to 1/128 power and mainly just to add some highlighting on the raisins.

Once I got that all set up, I brought in my ring light. I shot straight down with the 50mm, with the ring on axis. So I shot through the ring light, in other words. After a few tests, I figured out that the ring needed to be at 1/2 power to be bright enough. So really freaking bright. Even though the ring eats up 2 stops of light.

In hind sight, I think a lot of the light from the other strobes was being overpowered by the ring light. Maybe not entirely though, so it definitely helped add some contrast and texture to stufffff.

 The ring lights purpose was to fill in the shadows. As in, all the shadows. That's what ring lights do, they fill in shadows when you use them on axis. The make beautiful light, especially when you use some hard light with the to add back some contrast to texture.

For editing, I started with upped the shadows even a little more and upped the clarity just a hair. Next, I added a elliptical adjustment to brighten the raisins and create a bit of vignette. To wrap everything up, I add some blue to the shadows and golden tones to the highlights. Just to add that little touch that I like. 

See you tomorrow!