A little while back, Victor got me this crazy big white globe thing for lighting. It's almost a foot across think, basically just a big plastic light fixture kind of thing. It can make pretty cool lighting as it has a soft but also hard light effect. Light comes from everywhere on it.
We put the cookies on a lazy susan so that the wood grain would sort of blend in with the cookies nicely. I really like how the diagonal grain goes against the composition, things that are straight and level don't always work in photos. Sometimes you have to go, well, against the grain. haha so punny. But seriously, change things up, you never know what you might get, and it might be really awesome. Some of the best pictures are ones that happened just because someone decided to see what "such and such" would look like. They're experiments gone horribly right.
We placed the globe thing, and strobe, right behind the cookies. So the cookies were between me and the light. Sort of, sort of not because I decided to shoot straight down. I love this kind of shooting, it really has some sort of geometrical appeal to me. I arrange the cookies in a circle thing, and started test shots.
At first, it was way dark. The fixture ate up a lot of light. I settled on f/8, ISO100, and I think about 1/8 power on the strobe. The light created was soft, but obviously directional. I wraps around the cookies really nicely, but still leaves all the textures and detail in tact. I think it's one of the best lighting conditions we've come up with. The one thing I don't like the kisses blowing out a little bit in the highlights. Only one has actually lost information, but the others are really close. If I tone them down in Lr, they just get ugly and uck.
What I did do though, is lower the whites down to try to get some details back. Not the highlights, just the whites. I also boosted the clarity just a bit to bring out more texture, but this made me also raise the shadows a bit to compensate for darkening.
Sharpening was fairly advanced (for Lr). I first did a little noise reduction, then set my sharpening to a point where I could just barely start to see it doing something. If it's obviously sharpened, you've gone to far. Next, I adjusted my radios to be quite small, and my detail to be subdued as well. If you turn those up a lot, you get way over sharpened for most things. The masking was the important part though. I adjusted that so that only the details would get sharpened, not the smooth tones in the kiss and whatnot. They don't need to be sharp so why sharpen them?
See you tomorrow!
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