Lighting Slices of Fruit -- Experiments

I tried my hand at lighting fruit this past week. We received some blood oranges from a friend. I first arrange the halved oranges on a plate and took off-camera flash pictures. The flash was at a steep angle from the camera, off-left about 70-80 degrees. I could not seem to get the right amount of "sparkle" on the fruit. Either too much glare, or too little. I still gotta work on the angle, to rake the fruit.

To experiment more I sliced a thin piece of fruit from one the the blood orange halves. Because I didn't have a sheet of clear Plexiglas, I put the slice in a whisky glass, fashioned a blank piece of paper in front of my flash, and took a picture using TTL at +0.7 with my Nikon SB-800 as main. My on-camera D200 flash merely triggered the SB-800. There was no exposure coming from the on-camera flash. You can see the deep red colors of the blood orange, as well as some reflection from the glass.

To finalize the experiment, I went outside to the bright afternoon sun. I used a huge (24x30 inch) sheet of white opaque Plexiglas. After hydrating the slice with water (I didn't want to use oil or glycerin), I place the slice on the Plexiglas. I put the sun behind the Plexiglas/slice and took some images. Using matrix metering obviously underexposed the shot, due to the strong white back lighting. I then used spot-metering, and came up with the best exposure of +2.0 EV. However, the slice looks a bit washed out.

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Next time I will better plan the shot, including using a tripod...duh....Handholding the figuring out things on-the-fly just doesn't seem to work as well as a planned shot with tripods and lightstands.

Next Shot: Copying My Baby Picture Frame