Still Life
March 22, 2018
To start off, I never thought I would be excited to go and pick up herbs and tags to shoot on a table I built. NEVER. After I got everything set up, I was so stoked to start. Lately Ive been shadowing other local accomplished photographers and watching the processes they do when they setup, shoot, and edit. I can tell you its mind blowing how much it different from the way that I’ve been doing it since its started.
I even spent some time on a video production and showed my “mentor” (if you will) my old stuff, He showed me what he used to shoot and we laughed at how far we’ve come and old habits that we’ll never repeat. such as putting huge watermarks across the entire photo we publish. Even techniques that never worked, or the worst situations, and totally butchered shoots. It was a relief to know that I’m not the only one making mistakes.
Back to the shot, because thats why I’m posting this article after all. I set this up on the floor, with a reflector between the key light ( a large window) and used a 50mm to get really tight detail shots of the subjects. I used a relatively wide aperture, some where around f/4. I was hand holding the camera, so I was shooting with a shutter speed between 60 and 250. I like to change the shutter quite a bit while shooting this to get really bright, crisp photos. My main focus was to make sure the green from the plants didn’t jump out of gamma, which I’ve noticed my nikon likes to occasionally do. In Photoshop, I adjusted the saturation, made sure it was straight, and burned in the shadows a little. It is a pretty straight out of the camera shot for the most part. ( I did use a High Pass overlay to restore whatever detail I might have lost by over exposure.
I posted one on Instagram.
I’m really excited about the fact that I’ve hired someone to make me a new logo. I should have those online soon. I can’t wait to get new cards, Twitter header, and watermark for social.
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As always, thanks for checking me out.
May you have a picture worthy week.