Chocolate, Almonds and Raisins : Simple ain’t Easy

It’s been a long while since my last post, I know.  Caught up between school, work and my new best friend Toby ( about whom I will be talking in my next post ), time flew!

Today I am writing about my experience shooting tiny food objects like almonds and raisins.

We got an assignment at school, to shoot Fruit and Nut Chocolate in a creative way. After a short discussion with my faculty, I settled on a concept of few almonds and raisins with melted chocolate on them. Simple isn’t it?

Composing such tiny things is a challenge. I stuck almonds and raisins in place with glue tack and after 2 hours of shifting them around, I settled on a composition.

I chose to shoot it on a white acrylic background and with one light source. The light diagram is provided below :

Light Diagram for the shoot. The light from the soft-box was cut partially with a blag flag.

I used a thermocol (foam) reflector pretty close to the setup on the right side for a nice smooth fill. To bring out the texture in almonds and raisins, I used small reflective mirrors to fill some hard light from the front left.

After melting chocolate, I poured it on the composition with a dropper. That was the most difficult part of my shoot. It became messy and I couldn’t do any changes after pouring the chocolate and had a limited amount of time window to shoot as the chocolate would spread everywhere. Somehow, I managed. One way I saved my day was by pouring the chocolate in steps and taking a shot after every step. That way, I could choose the best parts of the pour and put it all together.

Chocolate, Almonds and Raisins

This is just my first try and many more would come soon. 🙂

All in all, it was a tiring shoot, but fun. 😀