Do you want fries with that ?

Here's something you aren't likely to see any time soon. This was an attempt at an image for a recent themed contest at dpchallenge. Tried to think up something as unlikely as I could to get some visual irony going and the juxtaposition of broccoli with McDonalds seemed to fit the bill. It seems to be a good technique for making interesting and arresting concept images - pick themes that don't normally work together and then make it work. electricity and water, McDonalds and healthy food. I also went with the broccoli to get a good green/red contrast with the McDonalds fries box. I wanted to pick a similarly contrasty background that would really highlight the fries box but wouldn't wash out the broccoli. That was going to be a bit trickier as an evenly light green background made everything seem flat. I tried to build some depth in to the shot by going with chiaroscuro lighting - where the background goes from light to dark in opposition to the lighting on the foreground. You can see this in how the background fades from bottom left to top right yet the foreground is lit opposite to this from top left to bottom right. I think this adds a lot of dimensionality to the shot - making it pop off the page much more than even lighting would. The lighting was with two remote strobes. An SB-28 to the upper left, fired through a 6 inch diffuser and just above/ in front of the broccoli. There was a small bounce panel infront and to the bottom right to throw some light back into the fries box - you can see the edge of that reflected through the M on the front of the packaging. The background was lit with a single strobe focused on the lower right corner of the background. This was at a quite low power and close to the background so that it would fall off across the frame, giving the darker corner. The final tricky part of this shot was getting the whole scene to float. I bought a 3 foot metal bolt from Home Depot (about $1.50) and some washers and bolts. This was attached to a tripod with ball bungee cords and poked through the background green paper. The fries packet had a hole punched in the back and was bolted to the rod, which was also pushed into the back of the broccoli to hold it all in place. A few additional pieces of broccoli were squeezed in to fill in any gaps. You can see more of the setup from a slightly crazy angle, on the right.