Orange Basket
A basket of oranges celebrates our final One Picture a Day for January. Taking up on the earlier theme of the perfect orange, we brought a basketful into our tabletop studio for some practice stock photography. We are using the Merax One Shot Studio once again. I had a little trouble with the equipment. The lights are very lightweight. I was working on a small table with the cords dangling down. The weight of the cords pulled the lights off the table a couple times. I dodged a bullet the first time, but I may have lost a bulb the send time. Oh, well. I’m getting a lot of use from this lightbox. If it continues to go well, I might just upgrade the lighting.
The geometry of the oranges was a discovery I had noticed when sitting at the dining room table for a meal the other day. The uniform sized oranges tended to settle in pattern, like a stack of baseballs.
Part of my reason for such a photograph is pursuing the art of stock photography, as in those perfect pictures of people and fruit you see in advertising. We want clarity, and straightforward, almost documentary images. No blemishes or distractions. Impeccable lighting. Minimal artistic flourishes. Fancy effects like grain, sepia or soft-focus can often be added by a graphic artist later in photoshop. I don’t expect my basket of geometric oranges to show up on a billboard anytime soon, but the skills developed in these practice sessions may be of use at a later time.
A challenge here was getting the oranges to be orange. They tend to photograph on the yellow side. Stock photography should be ideal, and that means orange oranges. The orange I fixed in post-processing. Now, if we were really serious, we’d need better oranges–perfectly round, no blemishes. For that I’d have to go to the produce section to pick each orange individually. We’re not that far off the edge yet.
This photograph was taken with our trusty Nikon 18-55mm VR on the Nikon D90. ISO 640, F/11 (to get some depth of field), 1/100 sec.
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