What kind of sicko makes a still life challenge minimal editing? Still life's beg for editing. A little darker here. A little lighter there. This needs a color tweak. That could use some sharpening.
Ahhhh!
Especially when I choose to do oranges. Reds and oranges are the colors that like to blow out for me. So I took this approach:
1. Try to get everything correct. Fail miserably because the JPEG is too dark.
2. Try again, with better light. Ok. This is better, but the colors suck. Too saturated.
3. Before trying a third time, here is the key. I took a RAW and edited it in Lightroom. What did this accomplish? I was able to see the histogram of the edited image. I saw that the blues were in the lower 25% range, the greens were in the middle 50% range, and the reds were near 75-100% range.
4. Now try again. Set the color style to Landscape so as to not pull up the saturation or contrast. Set the white balance to manual, and increase the reds and greens. This resulted in the image you see in front of you!
To light this I had 3 lights. In the back, about 18 inches above the scene, and to the left is a monolight with a grid and barn doors. The barn doors helped shape so that I got the exact right amount of light to give the catch lights on the oranges, as well as lighting up the juice.
A seconds monolight with a soft box was to the right, kind of in front, and feathered to have nice even light. This one was higher power to give the main light.
A third light was a handheld light bulb that throws off very wam light. This gave a little direction to the front of the image.
BTW, here is the edited RAW photo. So much nicer!
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You seem to have really though about the set up, but the composition and crop chosen is too tight. When I think of still life, I picture the entire subjects showing, it lacks negative space around it in my opinion
This has so much potential waiting to be unleashed, just like those oranges in the bucket waiting to become juice.
I really, really like the concept, but something is off in the execution. The framing, the lighting, the WB or a combination of all three.
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