Food for thought

Inspired by this yummy article on strobist I decided to have a go myself. Oreos are my wife's favourite biscuit so we often have them in the house despite their relative rarity in the UK so I tried to reproduce my own take on the strobist Oreo shot. This was my first time with all 4 flashes in action and the first real life outing of the foam snoots.




Then I used roughly the same set up to take this shot of something slightly healthier, a bit of bread.


So far in my off camera flash adventure I've only really focussed on getting good results with soft light so it was interesting to use hard light here. Hard light gives hard shadows and is suited to subjects where you want to emphasize texture.

Set up

The set up was two snooted flashes from behind (one each side), a background light (with a deep blue filter) and a bare strobe high and in front of the subject. I also used 2 mirrors to reflect the snooted flashes back at the bottom and sides of the cookie these basically lit the cream. Originally I had a white background about 50cm behind the biscuit and lit it with the blue flash but in later shots I wanted a more subtle blue so I used a piece of white paper and back lit it with the blue strobe. For the bread I moved the front flash lower and to the other side of the camera and I took out the mirrors. Also for the bread I didn't use the background light and used a held held, crumpled, peice of blue cloth as the background.


Post process

I cloned out any sign of the pin that held up the cookie/bread then I applied a few passes of the increased local contract trick in photoshop. In some shots I dropped the overall saturation and lightened the cyan channel to bleach the background.