September 28th, 2011 
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When there’s a free day at the studio, I’ll often have fun trying something I’ve never done before. I can spend hours happily experimenting – and just playing. My Slinkies shoot was was one example. This week, I’d seen a neat photo in a magazine of a lime being dropped into a martini glass. I wanted to try it!
The lights are tricky when shooting glassware. In these images, I had three lights, two at about 90 degrees from the line of sight and one slightly behind. The studio flash is so fast (about 1/2000th of a second here) that it can easily freeze the water – no pun intended. I used a cable release and dropped the strawberry with one hand, while triggering the shutter with the other. In the first few images, I caught the strawberry a few few inches above the water, and so had to learn to wait a bit on the shutter. After some trial and error – and lots of mopping up spilled water – I got the hang of it.
The lime didn’t work so well by itself, so I dropped it with some other things – in this image, two marbles. Towards the end of the day, I got a bit too exuberant, and broke the glass on one drop. Sadly, I didn’t capture the broken piece flying away – maybe next time!
Here’s a closeup of the shot above. As always, your comments and questions are appreciated. Bottoms Up!
In the image of the bread in a cooling tent, we wanted to show a bit of the reflection off the glass, but not have it be overwhelming. This is a matter of trial and error as you move lights around. Thank goodness for digital capture – there’s no cost to shooting hundreds of images, if need be.
