Fruit Exploding From Water

Hey,

My project de-jour this time is trying to copy a image I saw online...where it looks like a piece of fruit is punching or exploding out of water. I've seen it in ads for flavoured water etc. As an exercise it ended up being learning about flash sync speed and ninja like timing.

Anyway this is one of the better results...

Here is how I did it...

The set up is fairly straight forward... macro lens, white back-drop, back-drop light, big vase, front light, water and fruit. I moved the front light all over the place trying to avoid shadows on the fruit and reflections on the glass. In this photo it is up high but better results came from putting it almost directly under the lens. In a perfect world another speed light in front would have been good to play with.
 

Because I have only just started playing with proper studio lights the first thing I learnt is that they have limited functionality if you're shooting fast moving things unless you have special power packs. This is what happens if your lights aren't quick enough... the fruit is blurry because it is moving.

So I switched to my speed lights and this froze the action but clearly I had a bit of work to do to get the exposure right.

Also I needed to fine tune the focus.

This got it about right so it was time to cut up the fruit.

Lesson two was ninja like timing... since sadly I am not a ninja I had to settle on taking about 100 photos to get one or two with the fruit in the right place and an attractive splash. There were a lot that ended up looking like this.

Finally, I got enough that looked ok and here is the un-photoshopped result of the above final image.

As you have guessed rotating the image 180 degrees makes it look like the fruit is coming out of the water not going in and after removing the background and tweeking contrast and saturation I had a result.

Here are some others that turned out ok too.

 

 This one is probably my favorite mainly due to the closer crop and twist in the water splash.


That is it for this post... it is of some coincidence that one of my clients is 'Fruit Property'... is there an ad campaign in this Jon?

Cheers,
Brad.