During the first week of WPL I felt really bad that, day after day, the sun hardly ever came out so that I couldn't get a Lens Flare challenge entry. So I said to my WPL team mates:
Originally posted by yakatme:
I'd like to enter but it doesn't look good at the moment as it hasn't all week. If I don't then I will place top ten in the Granular challenge!
Honestly, I don't really care much for this image. As MelonMusketeer mentioned, it's not my style. I created it with the sole purpose of scoring high for my team just like with my image for the Zen challenge during the last DPL.
This was almost a last minute entry. On the last day to enter this challenge I thought about doing something that would grab attention and that would be different than most anything else, at least that was my hope. The idea of sprinkles came to mind so I went to Google for ideas. I liked the idea of a face covered in them but the only person that I thought that I could ask at the last minute was my son and I'm sure that he would say "no way!" So I went with the ice cream idea. I emphasize idea because I knew right away that ice cream wouldn't work.
I do a bit of food photography for restaurants and, in researching it a long time ago, I had read somewhere that food stylists use shortening instead of ice cream. Well, I used shortening dyed with red food coloring and it still melted and fell off of the tilted cone. What a mess!
I looked it up and found that the missing ingredient was powdered sugar...LOTS OF IT!. My recipe for 'ice cream' ended up being about a cup of Crisco shortening, 3/4 pound of powdered sugar, and about a teaspoon of red food coloring.
I set up one flash with a paper plate for a reflector to freeze the dropping of the sprinkles and two flashes, one with a red gel and one with a purple gel to color the white background. The one with the purple gel was intermittent in firing so I ended up with just a pink background instead of the vertical striped pink and lavender that I wanted. That's why the background is uneven and a little gray in the bottom right corner....good catch lens_hood.
Another problem was that I couldn't completely freeze the motion of the sprinkles when I dropped them. Instead, I had to throw them up from beneath the cone and hit the shutter as they reached apogee. It was extremely difficult to toss them up so that they arced only as high as the ice cream and press the shutter at the same time. Every few takes I had to sweep up the sprinkles, put them back in the bowl and start over again. This was one of the few takes that worked out.
I had a fairly heavy workload ahead of me so I thought that I would take an hour of my time to pull this off. It ended up taking about five hours from shopping to shooting to cleanup.
Statistics
Place: 3 out of 128 Avg (all users): 6.5233 Avg (commenters): 8.2000 Avg (participants): 6.3621 Avg (non-participants): 6.6053 Views since voting: 17342 Views during voting: 299 Votes: 172 Comments: 19 Favorites: 4 (view)
thank you for sharing the whole making of and investigation on the icecream sub.....because I had trouble once taking pictures with real icecream and got a little frustrated, now I can't wait to re-shoot the original with this mix ;) Awesome shot! Time well spent in my eyes ;)
"Honestly, I don't really care much for this image. As MelonMusketeer mentioned, it's not my style. I created it with the sole purpose of scoring high for my team just like with my image for the Zen challenge during the last DPL. "
I don't mind if you don't want to score highly... but will you please tell me the secret!?
Would have deserved a 10 if the background had been poperly done. Not only one can see some shadows but also it's not hte same pink and the lower right corner looks grey. 9 anyway, good shot.
A Sprinkle Celebration
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
