I made a small 'beach' on a table top and used a drink umbrella and a "Homie" figure to add atmosphere. I placed the grapes around the Homie so their presence and quantity could be confirmed and then used a small glass vial with cork stopper as the water container and hung a blue sheet a few feet behind it all for the background.
All that remained was to figure out 3 identifiable light sources. I was using window light as the main source and needed 2 other sources that would be visible and in line with the idea of the composition. For one, I set up an empty bottle with a green filter and diffusion plate behind and to the left of Homie and used a small mag-light focused on it from behind to create a distinct green spot-light of sorts in an attempt to simulate a lighthouse. I'm not sure that came off as well as I'd hoped but time was running out and I still needed another source.
As it was a beach party, a small camp-fire seemed suitable as ambience and light source. I placed a tea-light in the background and surrounded it with twigs to help with the illusion and ultimately decided to actually break off a few small twig fragments and add them to the 'fire' to get more realistic flame.
Then I took a couple of test shots in RAW to see how it all looked and finally set the camera to Jpeg FINE for the submission shot.
I left it uncropped and resized to 640 x 426 and then adjusted levels slightly to lighten a bit followed by USM and finally saved for submission.
I hope a few find it as enjoyable to view as I found it fun to create.
Statistics
Place: 15 out of 125 Avg (all users): 6.0866 Avg (commenters): 7.2308 Avg (participants): 5.6622 Avg (non-participants): 6.2069 Views since voting: 1657 Views during voting: 555 Votes: 335 Comments: 18 Favorites: 1 (view)
I'd like to say thanks to everyone who voted and/or left comments on this -- my first submission here! I had a great time making the photo and drove myself nuts watching the vote tally over the last week.
For the benefit of the few who wondered about the shallow DOF given the aperture range allowed, I was using a Nikkor 60mm Macro lens and was close enough to the entire setup that the area of focus would be pretty shallow. I did take a couple of shots stopped down as far as F10 but they just didn't have the same 'feel' as the one with the shallower DOF @ F6.3.
The focus on the duck's beak should be stronger, perhaps using a smaller aperture would have got better results in terms of focus around the duck and the bottle.
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