Danbo Cocktail Party



Danbo Cocktail Party

Today was the first day after the Christmas break that the house was back to normal, i woke after doing a late shift last night, to a empty house. Over Christmas i eyed up the over sized martini glass we had purchased and had an idea i wanted to try out. It was simply to capture a cherry splashing in the water. So today seemed a good day to set up the shot.

I took my old black curtain and set it up on the kitchen table supported by my travel tripod and a few boxes. I took the glass filled it with water. I then set up my Canon Eos 7D on a tripod and set up my Speedlight 580exii on a lightstand with a Lumiquest III softbox attached. The camera was fired by a canon infra red control and the speedlight was fired by the 7Ds built in transmitter. I also used the onboard flash with a hotshoe diffuser dialled down to about 1/128th or 1/64th power, cant remember exactly but it was one of the two. Used this as just a bit of fill flash.

After taking a few shots to get the lighting as i wanted these were the settings i used:-

Camera Settings

• Manual Mode
• Manual Focus
• 1/250th sec
• F/8.0
• ISO 100
• Built in Flash set to fire at 1/128th or 1/64th power

Speedlight Settings

• Manual Mode
• 1/8th power
• Lumiquest III softbox attached
• Fired wirelessly

The glass on its own didn't really have any kind of impact so i decided to include a few bottles and invited my wife's beloved Danbo duo to a party!

With the stage set it was now all a matter of timing the shot. The cherry was dropped by hand and as it fell i fired the IR controller checked the shot wiped down area and re shot. This was the cycle until i got a few shots i was happy with.

Made a few adjustments in photoshop which were:

• Shadow highlights adjustments
• Increase contrast
• Levels adjustments
• Hue/Saturation adjustments
• Curve adjustments
• Sharpened
• Copyrighted
• Added Border

Here is a photo of my make shift kitchen studio setup !

Studio Set up

 Thanks for looking and reading this far ! Hope someone found it useful and as ever please feel free to comment ....




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