Photography tips

When I walked in the other day, I saw something sitting on the kitchen bench that I thought would make a great subject to explore. I spotted on a plate the last of the Tomato's from the garden.

A plate full of rich, red tomatos seemed like something that I could have a go at shooting, so I just needed to set up somewhere to get the most out of it.

This is where my "temporary Studio" came into play again.

I wanted to shoot it without flash and to try it using my new Wide angle lens - so I found a spot outside that had plenty of indirect light and set things up.

My setup was pretty simple - I simply made use of my white cotton backdrop that I keep stuffed into a bag. I found a suitable support to get things up off the ground and set up the sheet as a background and backdrop.

I Did think to take a couple of snaps of how I set things up as you can see below.

You can just see in the middle of this shot the plate of Tomatoes that I was attempting to photograph.

I set this up under the edge of the carport outside, where the light was just coming past the end of it. I used a foam box standing on it's end as the support under my white cloth, and hung it up to the window sill.

You can see here in a closer shot of the setup that what I prepared offered a reasonably comfortable position to shoot from, and allowed you to get in close to the subject. I grabbed a model to stand in for me so I could show you the shooting position.

Now, onto the subject itself.

As I was shooting handheld, I set the camera up with this in mind. Even though I was shooting Aperture Priority, I kept an eye on the speed and adjusted the Aperture to keep it  over 1/20 second.

The setup offered me the opportunity to shoot from several different angles - from front on like the posed shot above, to shooting directly down on the subject and everything in between.

So I started shooting and checked the histogram after the first shot. I noted that with such a large amount of white that I needed a bit of exposure compensation - so I started with +0.3ev. Another shot, and I adjusted it to +0.7ev.

After a couple of shots it became obvious that the best focal length to shoot this subject was around the 20mm length. I also wanted a reasonable Depth of field and in the end settled on F5.6 (along with my 100ISO and 1/25 sec exposure)

Now, I had taken a series of shots, each shot making slight adjustments to the camera settings to ensure I had the best possible Image, it was now just a matter of taking pictures from different angles so I could find one that I was please with.

After about 5 minutes and about a dozen shots I settled on the one above as my favourite.  It took me no more than 10 minutes to set up the "temporary studio" take a series of photos and put everything away. I am reasonably happy with the resultant photo, and was even happier when we ate then for dinner - they were delicious!

Of course, with a simple setup and only a couple of minutes doing the shoot I was not guaranteed perfect results. Yes, there are several things that are not perfect about the above photo. If I were to do it again some of the things I would consider doing would be:

• use a smaller Aperture to give me more DOF
• Iron the sheet!
• Not use a white plate on a whte sheet

While the chosen DOF gave me a reasonable result, the stem on the front and back tomato is not quite as sharp as I would have liked. The middle ones are just fine.  Now, if I was to decrease the size of the aperture, then the time would have Increased. I would have had to use a Tripod to get it better.

I was trying to over-expose the sheet so the background was just plain white - but the wrinkles in the sheet provided just enough detail so that the background was visible.

The biggest problem with the picture was the edge of the plate is lost in the background near the top/right part of the plate. The direction of the light was strongest at this angle.

Even though the setup was not perfect, it was quick and it did allow me to get a photo that I was pretty happy with. By critically examining the result, and picking the 3 biggest flaws, it allows me to evaluate some of the things to consider next time to get an even better photo under similar circumstances.