Food & Mood: Lighting Setup

The semester moved into high gear quickly and I’ve spent my time recently finishing other projects and keeping on top of my classwork and exams. I want to post some photos I’ve shot recently for The Collegian.

I shot this photo as a headliner for the Arts & Style section’s focus on food in the January 27 edition. You can read the accompanying article, Food & Mood, over at the Collegian site.
Click on the photo to view it larger:

Lighting setup:

Alex Cothran and Marieke van der Vaart assisted me on this shot. I placed the veggies and medicine bottles on a cutting board, lit then from the right with a flash shot into a silver bounce umbrella, and created the purple background by shooting a purple-gelled flash through a translucent white backdrop (in my case the middle part of a reflector). I was short on time and made a mistake in the shot by using too large an aperture (4.5) and you can tell if you look at the pomegranate seeds. If I were to reshoot this, I would use at least f/8.

Note: I put what I should have done in the lighting diagram, not what I actually did. That said, the only difference is that I would have closed down the aperture and then adjusted the shutter speed and ISO accordingly. The lighting setup and flash powers are the same.

Gear used:
Canon 40D, Tamron 17-50, 2 flashes, purple Roscolux filter, Cactus V4 triggers