My second High-Speed entry, and one of those last minute entries, I have to up my skills when I can't use the magic of Photoshop and the basic editing challenges give me that chance :) This is shot in a similar way as my Blueberry Splash tribute to Jacko.
I put a vase on top of a pot, placed my reflector behind and lit the reflector using a 1000w hot-light. That way I managed to get enough lighting from the side and the back to be able to shoot at 1/640sec at ISO 100.
Then came the tedious trial and error phase of dropping one cherry tomato at a time in the wase until they were all at the bottom, then empty the vase, fill the vase with water, set up, focus, shoot 10 shots, and repeat. I did this about 5 times, so all in all about 10x5x3 shots = 150 frames (usually 3 frames per tomato)
Post processing was done by using photoshop cs3 raw editing (color temp down to 2700, vibrance up a bit, tone curve -8, 37, -24, -85, rotated and opened in photoshop), in photoshop I upped the magenta in the red channel using Selective Color adjustment layer and one curve layer as well. Framed and saved.
Statistics
Place: 102 out of 434 Avg (all users): 5.6905 Avg (commenters): 6.1429 Avg (participants): 5.6087 Avg (non-participants): 5.7895 Views since voting: 1414 Views during voting: 385 Votes: 210 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
I really like this photograph and think you picked a good name for it. I like that you used your reflector as the backdrop. That was a good idea.
The few things that I think could be better are as follows:
1 - I don't like the extra lines and specs in the vase towards the bottom of the image. It looks like some of them might be reflections while others might be particles in the water or on the outside of the vase.
2 - The water droplets in the air towards the very top of the image are enough out of focus that they are not interesting. I would like to see the camera lowered a couple inches to show more of the vase and less of the air and then scooted forward a bit more to show more detail. Just don't get that camera and lens wet.
3 - I wish the Tomato was larger. This however is not really possible with your choice of vase.
Congratulations on placing 102 out of 428 entries. Keep up the good work!
Excellent lighting here! :) Nice splash too. But with the composition as such this says more blue to me than red. Perhaps if the tomato wasn't so low in the frame it would've been more of a steady focal point.
I, for one, am not tired of the splashing fruit and veggies (yet). But I would have loved to have seen this as a red-on-red image for this challenge (red tomato with a red background).
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