Putting it all together: Cooking light

So enough of the boring test shots. This one is putting together some of the things I've learned so far, for the first Lighting102 Strobist assignment. The 'stage' is an upside down colander, with an sb-28 flash underneath, triggered with a pocket wizard. That shines the light up through the holes and hits the 'Nespresso' coffee capsule. This is a small orange capsule with a silver foil cap. I wanted to try to play the complimentary blue colour off the orange capsule to get some dynamic play between the colours and create some depth/ drama.

I first tried to colour the silver foil by reflecting a lit blue card, but I was getting a lot of reflections from the surface of the colander, giving a half silver, half blue result. Thinking about the angles a bit, I realised I needed to lift the capsule a bit, so I put some putty underneath, on the other side from the camera to raise the angle slightly. I then switched to using a Canon 580EX speedlight with a blue gel and a grid spot to focus the light onto the foil at a very low (1/128th) power. This coloured it up but didn't cast too much glare in to the lens. That's pretty much all there is to this - the lighting is on two distinct planes so the colours don't mix and I could vary the power of each independently.

I'd just been reading 'Light Science & Magic' and that explained a lot about how to achieve this, with discussion on the families of angles and lighting surfaces independently. Best of all, this got picked as one of the 'standout' entries for the assignment.