Care for a spot O'tea?

Day 5

I am currently doing a food photography challenge.  Everyday for 30days I get an email, and a blog post to read of the challenges I have to do.  It's been fun!


Today we had to think about how would the picture orientation fit our subject matter the best as we told the story of our image.

For me, determining which way my image may go depends on many things.

1) In which what is the set up going.  If everything is in an horizontal plain,  I would be more than likely to make the image horizontal (not unless I wanted some empty space in the top of the image for a dramatic effect).

2) Is there anything distracting in the image?  I may choose to crop and orientate my image to keep the offending item out of the image (or just remove the offending thing and move on.)

My subject was an awesome cup of mint tea.

This is the image I chose.  I chose to shoot it straight on so I could capture the tea pot in the background.  I chose to use a shallow depth of field (DOF) F4.0.  I also chose natural light and my tabletop, as I felt it would tell the story best and give the feeling of sitting at the table drinking some tea.  Lots of decisions to make whilst creating an image!

my lightmeter

My setup:

Diffuser and white board

 I used my lightmeter so I could pick what setting I was going to use for my camera.  I have a pretty good idea (not perfect yet) of what effect I want to get when working with an image.  I'm now wishing I would have gone with a f5.6 instead of the f4.0 because the cups handle was not in focus enough.  I also use a white board I purchased at my local craft store to bounce some light back into the darker areas, and my 1stop diffuser (I would have gotten to shoot at 5.6 if I did not use the diffuser, but the window light was too harsh for my subjects).



Other images:

We had to take some other images and work with the different orientations as well.  I even took advantage of trying different positions and DOF.  My second favorite is the overhead-horizontal image.   Would look even more powerful possibly if I moved it over and had some "negative" space off to the side.