Friday, January 6, 2012

Day 7: Fruit

In the 30 Day Photo Challenge series ...

Kyrie



Anna


f2.8
1/20
1600


Thanks to this Juicing 101 post, I had a conversation with Ken earlier this week about making V-8 style juice drinks for myself and the kids - particularly Gabe, who has anti-vegetable issues at dinner. I was thinking of using apples or pears as a sweet base for vegetable mixes... but when Ken came home from the grocery store yesterday, he had bought a huge pile of fruit, with nary a vegetable to be seen.

So then, when I looked to see what today's 30-Day Photo Challenge would be, I was vastly amused to see that the subject was "fruit". Plenty of that here!*

Kyrie's photo has at least one of each type of fruit that Ken bought; my photo just has the ones that I put into today's juice mix. (Which was a hit with the kids, of course.)

Today I wanted to see if I could figure out why there appears to be a (slight?) anti-flash bias on the part of professional photographers. Does flash really make for worse photos? 

My result is sort of a yes-and-no. In the end, I picked a photo without the flash, because I liked the softness and the more natural-looking colors. The pear, especially, tended to turn into a shiny blob of whiteness with the flash. However, you can see in Kyrie's picture how much clearer each individual blackberry and raspberry are, with the flash, and that was true of the photos I took, too. While the softness of the raspberries could be a positive feature, the blackberries on mine just get lost in the shadows. This *might* have been fixed if I had slowed the shutter speed by even more, to get more light... (I had the ap and iso to maximum already, and was trying to use a thick cookbook set vertically to stabilize the camera for a slow shutter. Have I mentioned how dark my apartment is?). But I was impatient to go make my juice, so I didn't take the time to upload the pics to the computer first to see them in detail.

So I can see why you might want to use the flash if sharpness is more important than natural color shades, but prefer not to use it in other situations.

Oh, and I also learned that I need to remember to use the light sensor, or else I end up with really dark photos.

*God's timing, I tend to think... proof that he wants me to be doing this 30-Day Challenge. We'll see if He favors it enough to provide a "sunflare" on day 23 and a sunset on day 12.


1 comment:

  1. I am not a professional photographer. And there is no denying that if you are going to take photos indoors, sometimes a flash is just a must. But in the end, flash-lit pictures don't look as good to me, especially of people and especially people with my, ahhh, coloring or rather, lack thereof. :-) Unless, of course, one has a professional flash. You get better quality out of low light situations with bigger lenses but in the end I don't think there would be a big enough lens for the kind of details you'd get with a flash in a low light setting.
    -Lisa

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