Shooting Chai

This weekend has not brought the best weather. Saturday it rained and rained, today it was cold and windy. So what's a guy to do? Make a Chai Latte and take pictures of it.

My goal with this shot was to make a clean, photographic white background, without blowing out the mug, and most importantly, the off-white foam on top. To do this, I set up three white foam core boards in kind of a tent. I then set my two Morris maxiSlave flashes pointing up at the two "roof" pieces to bounce the light around and get the overall exposure. Next I put a bare 285HV coming in from the back of the "tent" to blow out the top of the frame, since it was a little dark. Finally, I put a 430EX in a white umbrella, coming in from low left to bring up the front of the mug. Photo's exposure was lowered a bit in ACR to keep the mug from being washed out, the curves were tweaked bring a few pixels at the edge up to true white and dust was cleaned up in photoshop.

I found the biggest problem with the setup was getting a good angle on the mug. I'm starting to learn that if you get too high, cups and glasses start to look distorted, too wide at the top and too short in the body. The other problem was getting the reflections right. This shot would have been easier, and possibly more interesting, on some sort of textured, colored background, but it's good to know how to get white. I had some trouble with bad reflections on the mug, but subtle tweaking got that fixed.

Posted March 9, 2008 - Two Comments