Apple shot

Many people have been asking me how I took the apple shot or apple bullet, so here is a short description of the process.

Please note that I use RawTherapee and GIMP for my processing, and the majority of you probably use photoshop and/or lightroom. Well most of the techniques are exactly the same, but sometimes called something a little different.

So lets get going for this really easy shot!

Firstly the setup; you need

1x black background (I use my black jacket hung on the back of a chair)

1x Water holder (I used a glass vase with water)

1x Fruit, you know I used an apple don't you?

1x table to hold it on.

1x off camera flash. This is important, you can probably freeze the water quite well with your oncamera flash, but you must watch out for illuminating the background too much.

I use my flash off to the left, resting on a worktop slightly behind the background angled in towards the vase. (This was to avoid any light spilling onto the jacket)

So if you have all that you are pretty much setup. In the raw photo you'll see the setup in my kitchen, with the jacket hung on a chair and the vase sitting on a small table.

Setup up your camera for manual, at f11 and 1/180 (assuming your flash sync speed meets this)

Setup your flash at full or half power, and then take some test shots to get your exposure right. Remember you can adjust the flash for power, or the aperture, but don't touch the shutter speed, as its the flash that catches the action.

I would recomend keeping the aperture over f8, simply because with most lens' this is where they are sharpest. If you go wider than that they will get soft, and also with some lens the quality will deteriorate at f22.

Once you have your exposure right, fill up the water container to the top and get your fruit ready.

With one hand (or an friend) hold the apple above the container, with your camera focused in the other hand. Drop the apple, and press the shutter when it hits the water.

You will need to take this many time to get the look you want!

Processing

Ok so get your images onto your PC/Laptop, wipe up the mess you've made in the kitchen, and then open your editor.

Always taking a working copy of your base layer, and switch off the base. (This is so you always have the original to go back to)

secondly take another copy of the layer, and changing the blending mode to hard light.

This increase the contrast dramatically and gives the shot the drama it needs.

Increase the saturation to bring out the fruit and any reflected colours in the water.

Then remove the glass, by cloning water around the rim of the glass.

Then rotate the image so now it looks like the fruits moving sideways.

I also brushed out the edge of the glass so that the fruit looks like it was travelling through air.

Finally crop to get your final dimensions, and then sharpen. There are many ways to sharpen..I use an unsharp mask on the image, and then another one on a high pass filter layer. Doing this enabled me to get the sharpest drops I could without getting halos.

...and thats it.

for more photos checkout flickr