Last night I had a bit of a free night. I’ve seen this kind of shot done before, and I thought I would give it a try. I’ll explain how I did it below. Just to make everyone feel better, I didn’t take 6 pictures and was done in 5 minutes. I actually spent 3 hours on this project. More is explained below, but I took 141 images before I even started dropping fruit. I kept adjusting lights, moving the glass and changing the water level. Once everything was exactly how I wanted it, I started dropping fruit.

The cube in the center of the diagram represents the glass cup that was used. The cup was placed on a table that was covered in a shiny white tile board (this allowed for a reflection and a white ‘seamless’ look. I started by setting the back light, I used a strip bank softbox. I like the wrap around and contrast this helped create on the glass. Next I added a beauty dish left, I like the light a little better than a softbox. Then finally a bare speedlight camera right. Both the beauty dish and the speedlight where set to very low power to stop the fruit motion, but enough power to light the fruit. At first I started with a slow shutter speed (4 seconds). The reason I could get away with this was that the room was dark enough, no ambient light was captured, therefore resulting in the pulse of the flash to become the ‘shutter speed’. I initially leaned this way, because I was the one triggering the camera and flashes as well as dropping the fruit. Like I always do, I had everything setup with Pocket Wizards. For the first 2 frames seen below, I used this technique. Series of events: press shutter button, drop fruit, remote fire flashes, shutter closes. This worked pretty well, except I should created a darker room, because my aperture was at F/16 which meant my flash power had to be a little higher than I would have liked. So since I couldn’t get the room any darker, I increased my shutter speed for the remainder of the pics. My new series of events was now: drop fruit, remote fire camera which auto fires the flashes.

One last thing, your environment dictates the dynamics of the shot. Notice the black around the rim of the glass and the water drops that pop? This was done by carefully picking my surroundings. Understand this, water reflects its surroundings. So, underneath and behind the glass is white. Above, left, right and behind the camera was all black. The black surroundings is what enabled the water drops to stand out and now just fade into the white base. I hope you found this fascinating, I had a lot of fun creating it. NOTE: You don’t need fancy equipment to do this. As long as you have a camera that you can set the exposure manually and some off-camera flash you can create this. These shots are all created by the quantity and control of light on glass and fruit.