It does a body good!

Day 70, and I was looking around on Flickr for some inspiration. The shot I decided to attempt is a pretty common one, but it looked technically challenging.

Well, it was.

Behold my attempt at the milk splash:



The reason I chose this was a two-fold challenge: Lighting curved glass, and exposing a very white object.

I got the effect on the background I wanted with a slight ray effect on the mottled black, and I was able to time and light the shot fairly well by lighting from above with a snoot and a diffuser, but the exposure is still tricky. The milk is basically blown out, and there is not a lot of definition there.

By comparison, this was one of the shots I was looking at for inspiration. I still have a lot of learning to do!

Sick of ice yet?

For day 54, one more ice cube shot. Last one I promise, at least for a while.

The reason is that I wanted a different treatment of a similar subject. Last time, I was blowing out highlights, and getting tightly cropped, so this time I went low-key and gave it some space in the frame:



Shot on black fleece which does a really nice job of killing any reflection, and it only needed very, very minimal cleanup of light spill. Basically, twenty pixels or so of gray right haloing the base of the glass, the rest of it is clipped. This was accomplished with the 580EX II off-camera, shooting down from above, and snooted with a Honl flexible snoot/bounce card.

The shot might have been better with a second point of focus, because otherwise there is just a lot of black, but so be it. It looks like I expected, good or bad.