Food Shoot with Strawberries

I had some strawberries in the fridge, and I thought I would take a shot at taking photographs of them. The leaves are a little past perfect form, but they worked. For all of these shots, I shot near a window with lots of indirect light. I used no flash. A bit different for me, but thought it would be a good exercise. I also had two kids hanging around wanting to spray things with the spray bottle of water I had out.

The shot above has the berries on a low table out a few feet from the window, so that I could fit between. There is a white poster board with a sheet of Plexiglas on top. The reflection is not very evident with the white background, and that is what I was looking for, so I switched to black.

Now we have black poster board, with the Plexiglas on top. I lowered my angle a bit on this shot too. I like the reflection here. You can also tell just how important (and difficult) it is to get the Plexiglas clean. I could get that in Photoshop, but for this exercise, I didn’t feel like it. I then wondered what it would be like to bounce some light in from behind with the white poster board.

This is still the same black poster board with Plexiglas on top, but the color that we got from them is quite a bit different when we added the white reflective surface from behind. I am not sure which on I like better.

One thing I would do different next time, is go for more depth of field. I would need to get more than the f/4 that I used. To do that, I would need a tripod. I was being lazy. These shots are using ISO 400 and 500, with shutter speeds of 1/45th to 1/15th of a second. That is really to slow to hand hold, especially if you wanted to get more depth of field.

This was just a quick project I did in between family activities. Next time, a tripod, and maybe see about lighting it with flash.