Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Rembrandt Lighting Technique

So I figured out a new technique to use in photographing fruits and vegetables last week. I call it the Rembrandt Lighting Technique, because it gives a nice "Old Masters" kind of brooding look to the pictures.
It's pretty simple actually. I set up a black cloth on my dining room table, which is next to the deck door, which provides good sidelight. Then I set up my fruit(s) or vegetable(s) and putting my camera on the tripod, set it on f/22 to really slow the shutter down, and I used cloudy natural sidelight with no other lights to take these photos at somewhat long exposures of 2-5 seconds.
The long exposures and cloudy, diffuse natural light seem to allow for rich, saturated colors in the pictures, despite the fact that when I set them up, you'd think they'd be the worst, underexposed, drab looking pictures ever.
In fact, I was just desperate to photograph something when I started this project last week. I didn't have time to leave the house and find a landscape and the light was wrong anyhow--it was cloudy! So when I set up, I thought, "Girl, you must be crazy. These are going to be ugly!" But after a little tweaking of the exposure times and aperture, this was what resulted. I'm quite happy with it. What do you think?





Cindy

Cindy
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