I want it SO bad!

-Up close and personal with a beautiful berry

Yesterday I bought strawberries. Huge, shiny red strawberries! 

I just knew I had to photograph some before eating them.

I absolutely love making photographs of single or just a couple of berries. A berry is such a treasure when you move up close and personal to it. Of course berries look delicious in color and shape by them selves, but when you see them trough the macro lense you'll be amazed!

The first thought that comes to mind when photographing food is to make it look delicious. I guess you've all seen terrible examples of blurry  food photos, often shot with too much flash, thinking you will not survive if you eat that. Am I right?

Food should look delicious. The photo should make people think "I want that!" or even better "I want that SO bad!"

A couple of years ago I bought a little nylon photo tent of the Internet. It's no more than 40cm x 40cm x 40cm. I must say, 12$ well spent. I shoot most of my food macros in this tent. It even came with different backgrounds in black, red, blue and white.

I've done several berry shots with white backgrounds, so I decided to do a black one.

I put a cup under the black cloth to place the strawberry upon, and got out my flash and maco lense.

Now, I didn't want shadows on the wall in the back of the strawberry and I most certainly didn't want a huge bright flash destroying the beautiful texture of the berry. The simple solution to avoid both is to shot the flash in the roof of the tent, and as you can see this brings out the texture of the berry.

Black velvet backgrounds is cursed with attracting dust, and in macros you see every single piece of it. The best thing to do is to use a dust roller before photographing, but sometimes you have to remove some dust by editing afterwards.

EXIF:  f/13 ~1/125 ~ 60mm ~ Flash, compulsory

I have used  aperture f/13 as some of you, who photograph yourself, can see. This is because I wanted the whole berry to be sharp. A lower f/number would have made parts of the berry blurry.

The strawberries didn't taste much, but the joy of immortalizing one of them overshadowed the dissapointment.

So, there you have it; my shiny red strawberry in black velvet!