Window on Cherry Pie Lane

Sunday, May 3 – My final food photography assignment was a doozy. We had to chose two photos from books, magazines, calendars, etc. and then try to duplicate them. Wow, that is not as easy as it sounds. You don’t realize how much a photographer considers position and light when they do their setup. We were told to pick simple subjects, which I thought I had. I picked one that showed raspberries and mandarins and they were sprinkled with sugar. Well, you can not sprinkle sugar on fruit and not have it bleed. Even when I did it right as I shot, I had a problem. I would dab up the juice and shoot on. They turned out great and looked exactly like the original photo I picked. I was surprised, as I have no professional lighting system. I just used my refectors and a little diffused back light and a north facing window. Even Walter was impressed how well they matched the “real” photo.  I shot a couple of macro shots at the same time and one of those was posted for my Day 122 photo. I had also purchased the ingredients to do two more setups (one for a backup, in case something didn’t work).  One was chocolate pudding which turned out to be the biggest challenge of all. I ended up using mirrors to reflect, in addition to my silver reflector. My pudding wasn’t as smooth as the original, but everything else looked really close. I found a metal bowl that matched what they had used as that contrast outside the pudding bowl. I had to use a can to sit the pudding on to elevate it to the right height. My highlights could be better too. I found it wasn’t so easy to put a dollop of Cool Whip on just so. You have to do some prep to the top of the CW before you even scoop it out for it to look right. Holy cow, what a challenge. For the final one I chose a grouping of various colored peppers. The peppers available at the store were not as big and nice as the center one in the original photo. But I made do and am very pleased at how it turned out. I even have that little bit of green stem at the bottom that the pro had used. They are really close to being a match.  From the three shoots I did ( pudding, berries and peppers), I had to chose the two I liked best and then recreate in some way to my liking. It was hard deciding between the berries (I already had my recreated macro there) and the peppers. I had purchased an orange pepper (go figure!!) and decided to add it to the mix and to turn it upside down for some added texture. I like how the photo turned out with a little changing around. So now it is on the Capturing the Beauty of Flowers class.

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