320: Confection Racket

I drop the M&Ms and try to trigger the camera at the right: Not easy to do, especially when you consider that all digital cameras have a slight delay between pressing the button and the shutter opening. Okay, DSLRs are pretty damn quick, but the delay is nonetheless there. Out of about fifteen tries, I got two-thirds fairly well timed, but I really could have done with more M&Ms to fill the frame. Like a whole bowl next time!

Set up with a large mirror on a table, black velvet cloth hung over from behind at a slight angle, and a barrier of upended VHS cassettes around the perimeter.

Settings: f/7.1, 1/180, ISO 400, P-FA 50mm, 1/4 flash, mirror, black velvet, tripod. Levels adjustment and crop to vertical 16:9.

220: Birthday Cakes

Delicious cakes! The cake in the background had candied ginger and amazingly mirror-like hearts on top, while some of the chocolate leaves on the foreground cake were cast from geranium leaves - a side effect being that the geranium taste could be tasted on them. It was an acquired taste for some, but I found it extraordinary.
I feel genuinely spoiled today.

Settings: f/2.5, 1/180, ISO 100, P-FA 50mm, 1/4 bounced flash.

055: Sweet Wrappers

Such bright colours. This one was another straight from the camera, another first shot got just right.
Close scrutiny reveals a curious fact: The wrappers are not solid colour [as I imagined,] but printed with their particular colour tint, plus the white text. Actually, this detail is difficult to make out in the 1600-pixel version here, but the full 3872-pixel original definitely shows the printed pattern of colour.

Settings were f/5.6, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42, 19mm extension, low flash, white reflector. The chocolates were arranged in an eggbox, four in each of the six dips. A simple and effective setup. The background blobs are a bit hexagonal, but that's fine by me.

043: Nuts & Syrup

Caution: This image contains nuts; also plenty of sweet syrup and chocolate.
I tried a different lens today - an old Tamron SP 28-80 macro-zoom with adaptall mount. Using an M42 adaptall, I added 52mm of extension tubes (inc. PK adapter ring,) and the result is quite a versatile macro lens.
However, it's not without its drawbacks. First, the rubber hood is quite wide and shallow, making it harder to avoid flare. What's more, the lens has no "manual" stop-down selector; this is a bugger because if I wanted to shoot at any f/no. more than mide open I would have to tweak the mount somehow. I might try some other time, but today I just used it as it was and hoped the flash wasn't too fierce. The aperture range wide open is 3.5-4.2, so it's not so fast that I get a completely unstable result.
The in-focus areas are pretty sharp, actually. The light was quite blown out at the left side, but I managed to rescue it with some judicious slider-tweaking on the exposure control and shadows/highlights functions in Raw Therapee. It might have come out better if I had used the white card more carefully underneath, but I didn't want to get it too close that the image might get more cloudy - the lens is wide open, after all.

010: Chocolates!

Aah, chocolates.
I'm sure some people wish they were a complete foodsource, but not I. Why..? They wouldn't be special if we ate nothing else! I see the maker's logo is noticeable, although I'm not advertising them. Honest. (They're nice enough, but not my favourites.)
This shot was done using the same basic flash setup as the potatoes, but with the black chocolate box paper underneath. This was to give the shot a dark base for richer contrast and shadows, and to keep the chocs clean. They are for eating, after all.
I keep a few large sheets of white expanded polystyrene around when I do these kind of shots - I find them very useful for holding in one hand to bounce the flash around at arbitrary angles. Cheap and effective.
Oh dear, I just noticed a fingerprint on one of the chocolates. Not so perfect now, but nevermind. And there's green fringing in places too, that'll be from using the lens wide open. But who cares - I'm tired and they look delicious anyway.