making of an image

Howdy folks!

Wazzup? Hope the weeks and weekends are going great. Great food with good old friends…haan? Hmm! Hope you all are doing that…such simple things keep you alive and kicking in all kinds of situations. Dont ever be left ontouched by your friends for a long gap or else the solitude will addict you and one day make you a dumb moron!

Well, talking about great times does have an necessary ingredient….great food. When i say food it can be something as silly as a cup of tea or a huge buffet, matters very less what it is. But mouth watering food adds its on specialty to making any moment a memorable moment. And i was having one such nice time with my wife yesterday eve…..was relishing some absolutely amazing mangoes and delicious lychee. It was awesome and when finished, i was left with something that kind of yelled me a challenge….am talking about this:

.

.

.

It kind of was an opportunity for me to make a picture out of it. Call me a photo freak or whatever, i was able to see beauty in this leftover. The colors appealed a lot to me. So i thought of taking a shot that would bring out the beauty that i was seeing. Started of with various shots with various lighting effects..

.

.

.

Sometimes the fruit colors didnt pop up well and some times the bowl didnt pop up well

.

.

.

And in between those shots i struck a shutterspeed – aperture combination that gave me a nice effect to the bowl. I was happy with that and decided to stay with it:

.

.

.

Now the only job left was to bring up the fruit left over. The color load and the shapes. I played around with a lot of shots from different angles and framing and finally got something that i was pretty happy with:

.

.

.

I was not extremely happy with the final outcome but yes i was much happy to get this shot and took an opinion from my wife. The awe in her eyes convinced me to be satiated with the result 😀

More of the things in our life go with this same flow. Am not saying this for the sake of saying. We all see opportunities a lot many times in all walks of life, right there in front of us, within our head while others totally miss it. The difference lies with till when do we stay with the idea. How long do we work on the opportunity we just saw. Its very easy and commonplace to give up and say “it was not going to click. If it was that simple and intuitive to me, someone else would have already thought of it before and done it”. Much of the world around are loaded with simple solutions to big problems (which are seemingly big, not in actual). I couldn’t resist sharing this thought with you all since all of us give up more often than hold on and stay with the gut.

And i learnt this lesson from Penny De Los Santos. She was one of the recent teachers at my favorite creative live class. She is a food photographer and the emotion she puts into making an image and the way she always practices and preaches the concept of “stay with the subject for some time” had a great impact on me. You may check out 2 of the images she created out of very difficult subjects during that class here : Penny’s blog. More often than before, i have imbibed that habit into almost all of my daily activities to stay with an idea that i thought would work out but didnt work out that soon.

Bottom line….if something clicked your mind, nice chances are that it will click in actual. Just stay with it and keep working on it.

Like usual, shared below is the lighting setup that i used for the last shot that i took in above series. Its quirky to handle everything single-handedly, but had no other choice you see? 🙂

Would love to hear from you, your views on the bottom line and the final image.

Cheers!

.