Cream in my Coffee

Similar to the in-home studio the other day, I shot the photo to the right. This was not nearly as difficult to take as it might appear, although it does require knowing a bit about your camera and strobes.

So the setup: similar to before, although with different items for proping up the flash.  Flash was still to camera left, but this time it’s firing against the background.  The background was black before, but this time it’s solid white.  In fact, it’s the same piece of paper that I was using as the reflector in that previous shoot.

Overall settings: to capture moving items, you need a fast shutter speed.  Here I’m running at 1/200th of a second.  To regulate light, I had to mess with the f-stop and the flash.  I expected 1/16th power at f/9, but it turns out I was just fine with 1/32nd power at f/13.

Timing?  There’s no magic – just take a ton of pics.  In this case, I took almost 70 pics, out of which maybe 5 were gallery-quality (timing-wise, that is).  This was the best.

Go ahead, click through to Flickr.  You’ll see incredible details on the larger version!