The winner In our recent ‘Food’ competition was Karen Fleming with her homely coffee cup image. Here, in the second of our ‘How I took that shot’ series, Karen explains how she created this image (click to enlarge).

“To come up with the food shot I thought to myself what is my favorite thing that I like to indulge myself with? The answer was simple enough – a nice cup of coffee accompanied by cake! Since Irish weather does not lend itself to alfresco lattes, I had to work indoors, and where is nicest place to enjoy such a treat besides out in warm sun? Curled up in front of a blazing fire!”

“This gave me a general idea for the shot set up. As I was using the theme of ‘homely / fire’, I wanted to portray the element of “home made” in my shot so I borrowed the coffee grinder and bean sack from a friend”.

“With all the elements at hand, I began to set up the shot. I put the coffee table in front of the fire in a dark room to cancel out all other ambient light and bring out the detail and colour in the firelight itself. One of the biggest challenges was to find a shutter speed that would be slow enough to bring the firelight into the shot and fast enough to hold some detail in the flames without them blurring totally. There was a lot of trial and error to get the right look”.

“I set the camera on a tripod and at ISO 100, I chose f22 to give me depth of field through the shot. I tried a few different shutter speeds to get a feel for where the fire was casting light onto the table and the objects on it. Looking at the results of these I could then see where I needed to start adding in extra light to my image”.

“To achieve this additional lighting, I put a flexible desk lamp on the left and a flash head on the right fitted with a snoot so as to concentrate the light from that side onto a specific area in the image. I only used the modeling light of the flash head and not the actual flash itself. This could have been achieved just as well with a second desk lamp, fitted with a home made cardboard cone for a snoot”.

“Now I had ambient light in the background from the fire and fill-in lighting coming from both sides, so all that was left now was to add some light from the front to highlight some of the details. For this I used my LED ring light, which attaches to the front of the lens. This is a continuous light source that can be switched from full ring to half ring, left or right as desired. They are designed for, and I use it mainly for, macro photography. They are available for about St£30 online”.

“All set up, I left my camera on f22 and tried different shutter speeds to see the effects I was getting. Too slow was bringing in too much light and too fast was not enough light. Two seconds gave me exactly what I wanted”.

Technical Details:
Canon 5d mk 1. Sigma 105mm macro lens.
ISO 100, f22 at 2 seconds.
Levels and Curves adjusted slightly.

See more of Karen’s images here.