Playing with food at 1/800th second exposure

This is just a short post from me today as I am preparing for a "food photography" workshop that I am running at beautiful Lyndendale Gallery next week.

Recently a Photography Group of Bunbury topic was "Freeze Frame" - an image taken using a shutter speed at 1/800th second or more. 
I am very happy to say that I received a "silver" award for this image.



The most essential ingredient for this shot was to have a very patient partner to help you by pouring the wine. My husband fitted the bill - bless him. We tried many different glasses and many pours over an hour and a half. Pour, put back in the bottle, clean up, pour again. You need to take multiple shots of every pour.

In the end this shot won it for me with the way the wine sloshed up both sides of the glass and those drops bouncing off the rim. 

 Please click on "read more" to keep reading and seeing more pics

 
My set up was a shiny white tile on the kitchen bench with a piece of white perspex as the backdrop. I had a LED work light on the left hand side, and a white bounch board on the right hand side. I had my camera on a tripod. I used my 100mm macro lens and used all manual camera settings - Aperture F/3.5, - Shutter speed 1/800th sec, -ISO 400, - focal length 100mm, - spot metering, - no flash. 
I took the image in raw and then uploaded to Lightroom for initial post processing, with additional tweeks through a program I love called - Radlab. They are a collection of processing presets you can download from the web. 

Here are some other shots that didn't quite make the final cut - 

  On another day I played around again sifting flour over a ball of pastry. This was tricky to achieve by myself, so I preset the focus on the ball of pastry and used a cable shutter release for my camera. Cable release in one hand and flour sifter in the other - Tricky but I was happy with this result.  If you don't have a cable shutter release you could use your camera's self timer. 
For this shot I used my 50mm lens so I could stand closer to sift the flour as well as controlling the cable shutter release. Settings were F/2.8, 1/800sec, ISO 200, 50mm, Spot metering, no flash. 
Sadly this shot didn't make the grade with the judge at the photography group even though he said it was well executed. 

 Here is another experiment last year with noodles. It was very tricky to get the noodles to hang "just so" when you only have one hand to pick them up with the chop-sticks.

It's fun to experiment, especially if you have a friend to help.

fresh farm picked autumn Quinces

 Thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.

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 You might also like - 
Playing around with food and light
Cook it, plate it, take a pic, and then pack it for a picnic
And slices of quince which they ate with a runcible spoon