So near, yet so far.....

Strobist's Boot Camp II: Assignment #2 is all about food photography. It's my 2nd attempt in participating into strobist's Boot Camp assignment. And my second attempt inparticipating into an international photographic competition. The first assignment was some moons ago and it's all about long exposure couple with off camera flash thingy and my submission didn't go well back then.

Shooting food is a piece of cake. But to make it interesting and pop to grab the attention of the judge is not only a piece of cake: it's a whole big round of huge cake ! Food photography can be as boring as I can imagine it, and as artistic as I couldn't understand it. I try to be an artist, hence I choose the later concept.

We were only given a week time to complete and submit our photo through flickr.com. One week is not a long period of time, and being a working and family man like me, strickly speaking I have only less than half a week time to complete my work. No time to think much, I started to ask my wife to make a cake and I got this:


The lighting was a simple one flash with reflector set-up as explained my strobist's post here. I basically copied the whole set-up from strobist as shown in the pic below:


One flash bounced from an umbrella with a white surface card as fill on the face of the cake that's nearer to the camera. All right, not even close to what strobist did. LOL.

Anyway, later I found this shot is so cliché and I decided to do the second shot. That was 2 days before the dateline ends on Saturday, local time.

I want something simple. Later I found out that if I couldn't "enjoy" the tastiness of the food I'm going to shoot, I wouldn't get a great photo. Hence, I started to wonder in the kitchen. Later I found the sugar crackers laying quietly in a corner of the kitchen. Hey, I like that very much ! I could finish a whole lot of them while watching my favourite tv show ! So I decided to take a porn shot of the sugar cracker ! LOL

Black background is so boring. Hence, a short visit to Tesco near my house, I bought some seamless colour paper. I wanted the cracker to be floated in the middle of the air. Hence, a small wine glass can be a good supporter for the cracker. I set up my flash, snoot it and test shot:

Nah, I don't like the shadow, but I like the vignetting create by the snooted flash. First shot is out. Then I started to look around my room, and I saw my DIY ring flash adaptor. Hey, it's a food porn, shoot it like a porn lar ! LOL

So, I set up my ring flash adaptor, and do a test shot first before the actual food porn. LOL


I always like the output from ring flash. It gives a shadowless type of picture. Look nice, and I like, hence ring flash is my main light. So, I started shooting lar.


This pic doesn't feel right about it. There is something lacking over there. Although the ring flash did provide a nice spread out of the flash light over the cracker, it just look plain and pale. Again, since this is a food porn, I should shoot it like a porn ! I intro a kicker flash ! And this is my submission photo :

And click here to see my set up pic. Simple, porn-like, and I hope it has the touch of a fashion feel. I produced my work 2 hours before the deadline, and manage to upload to flickr.com 1 hour before the deadline. LOL. Pretty simple, right ? Anyway, just try my luck. :P

After browsing through the other submission from the all over the world, I have no faith in my work! LOL. Well, it's just the experience I wish to gain, and like usual, I enjoy the process of producing the photo and of course at the end of the shooting, I ate the cracker. LOL

Not until one day an email from flickr.com dropped into my mail-box and it's from David the Strobist himself !!! He said:

I was like "WOW !" That's mean my submission is being in the Top 50 from out of 800++ submissions !!

That means a lot to me ! It's an international competition, and I made to the top-50 from 800++ submissions ! This is so far the highest achievement of my hobby I adopt two years ago, and I'm really honour to have come to this stage so far although I didn't make it into top-10 (the top-10 shown here in strobist). :P

I really like the top-10 selections from strobist himself, and his comments on the finalist carries lot of info into it. Those photos are superb ! And I'm really enjoying browsing through the top-10 photos from this assignment.

I was 1/50th to the winning price of Orbis ring flash and strobist DVD set. It's so near, and yet it is so far away.

I can't wait for the 3rd assignment. :D

Final note, I don't see any M'sian participate into this assignment. Probably I'm the only one, yes?