Cantaloupe

Our assignment last week had us shooting food. I found my idea online while looking up food photos. I really like cantaloupe and paired it with honeydew melon and mint. I threw on a few blueberries for a contrasting color.

Funny story about the accumulation of my needed items....I was down in VA for my brother's wedding this past weekend. I have been searching for this certain hat to use in another shot I need to do, so we looked in a few stores that were in the area. We stopped in this store called Ollie's. We made fun of the guy - maybe Ollie? - who seems to be their branding identity.



But we went in anyhow and found ourselves faced with a store full of bargain items. I picked up a melon baller and some dish towels that I thought would compliment the fruit for my food shot. I also got cinnamon sticks, since my roomie was saying she had difficulty finding cinn. sticks and not ground cinn. I got them all out to the car, and my friends drove me to another friend's house. I got out of the car, having that feeling of, "Oh, I think I am forgetting something." And sure enough, later that evening I realized I forgot the bag in the car. For a brief moment, I got frustrated thinking I'd now have to find the melon baller and similar towels once I flew back up to MA, but was reminded that Ollie's was only 5 minutes away. So I went back and re-purchased my items from Ollie's.

Oh, and throughout the two trips to Ollie's, no hat! BUT...I was successful in finding some comparable in T.J.Maxx. So tomorrow Rikki and I will be shooting that picture.

Here's the food shot I ended up with; I really like it!



And, I remembered to take a shot of how the bay looked as I was setting up this shot:



Notice how "ugly" the board is that I'm using and that it doesn't cover the entire table we're working on. Notice how bright the light hitting the cantaloupe appears, but when it "fires" (since it's a strobe and not a constant light source on - like a lamp), it gives the effect in the final shot. Notice all the stuff sitting to the sides of my set as well as the darker brown piece of wood in the background. When I was first framing my shot, the main piece of wood "ended" and I could see the background of my bay. My instructor simply told me to get a piece of wood from the back to add as some fill-in.

And one more thing...remember how I've frequently referred to being "tethered" to the computer? Well, I tried to capture in this image the computer so you could see that when we take a picture with that big 4x5 camera, the only place we see the image is on the computer screen. It's very helpful for seeing what's in focus (or not) and see how a cropping of the image would appear without leaving the studio. Then we simply save the files to our hard drive when our session is done and import them into our Lightroom catalog when we're in the computer lab.