Kiwi Power!

Apparently, my roommate Nick has never had a kiwi before....I told him his life was incomplete. Kiwis are possibly the best fruit on the planet, next to bananas of course. Bananas have everything going on for them, but kiwis just have have succulence that bananas don't. I think the perfect fruit salad would be bananas and kiwi. Maybe strawberries and blueberries too. And maybe some raising, plums, and nectarines. But still, kiwis are a top 5 fruit. 

Just so happened that T&C had a sale on kiwi, so I bought a whole bag of them and have been savoring them all week. So deliciousness. Tonight, I thought it'd make a good picture to do a still life of a kiwi. 

They have a really, really interesting texture. The skin is very shiny, like an apple. But the hairs break up the surface, turning it into a semi matt semi gloss finish. I was dying to see how specular highlights would show up on  such an interesting surface. Normally, with mattes and textured stuff, the highlights are kinda soft. They're pretty, but not the same pop that glossy has. 

I shot at 1/200, f16, and ISO100. I wanted lost of depth of field. Lots. Plus, that's when my lens is sharpest. When you stop down too much, the light rays actually bend and detract off the iris blades, which causes blurring and confusing on the image sensor. So even though you get a bigger depth of field (more in focus), the over all sharpness goes down quite a bit. 

So for lighting, I used a single strobe (1/16 power) with a grid on it. The light was held about 4 inches above the kiwi, just out of the frame. I pointed it straight down, so make a very strong spotlight effect on the fruit. Normally, the specular highlight on a round surface would be over powering and somewhat central to the image, but on the kiwi, it was just kinda there. Not in a boring way, but just subtle and discrete. As a whole, the kiwi rises from black, inky shadows into bright, almost white specular highlights. Most of it is true value though, with super crisp texture. It's such a simple lighting scheme, but powerful all the same. I quite enjoy it. I'll probably use it again for portraits I think. See what it does on a human face. That could be really interesting. 

For editing, I started doing things in color, but then thought about it and decided b/w would fit the fruit much better. Kiwis are a wonderful green brown, but the photo lent itself to monochromatic.

I did some local adjustments on the surface just in front of the kiwi to blur it out and get rid of some scratches and stuff in the white board I was using for a table. I also upped the whites a bit and toned down the highlights. This just gave a little more detail in the highlights. Finally, little lens correction to fix some distortions on the edges. And that's it! 

See you tomorrow!