When life hands you an apple, make applesauce

Or just take some totally cool and fun photos!

I wanted to do some water shots with apples, so I looked for apples that weren’t a solid color. I found some that had a lovely mixture of red and green/yellow tones.  Finding apples that had the right “look” was easy – finding ones that had stems still attached was tougher! An old guy kept giving me funny looks as I picked up apple after apple, looking for the surprisingly elusive stems.

Setting up for the actual water shots took almost as much time as finding the apples, but it’s actually a pretty simple process: Tie a string around the apple stems and hang from a horizontal boom arm. Place an inflatable kiddy pool underneath to catch the water. Set up 3 flashes – one at about 45-degrees front and slightly above the apples, one set opposite the first except slightly below the apples, and one set behind the apples and to the side.

Then it’s a matter of filling a plastic cup with water, throwing it up at the apples with one hand while releasing the shutter with a remote cable with the other hand. After taking the shots, I removed the cord from the photos in either Lightroom or Photoshop, and then rotated many of the photos, since I think they look cooler when horizontal.  I originally had the backlighting quite diffused, but I found I actually liked the effect with the blown-out, totally white highlights on one edge of the apples. I know some photographers will grimace at this, but I liked it, so that’s what I did.

Voila! The results:

All photos © Colleen D. Gjefle

 

4 Comments

  1. these r awesome! u make it sound easy but i’m sure it wasn’t. luv them!

    Reply
    • Wow, that’s a really clever way of thnnkiig about it!

      Reply
  2. This is a great post. Thanks so much for sharing, like always.

    Reply
  3. Love these shots!

    Reply

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