The story behind the shot – Fruit still life…

…although to be honest if it had started moving about under it’s own volition it would have freaked me out a bit!

Something with a bit of colour to hopefully brighten your day.  This was taken using natural window light which gave nice soft shadows. I used three items of fruit, all familiar but having distinct colours and shapes. I focussed on the lime at the front, using a wide aperture to throw the remainder out of focus. If you look at the orange which is slightly behind it, you’ll notice that it’s not sharp and the lemon behind is even less so,  although they’re still both recognisable through colour and shape.

Differential focussing is a powerful tool that’s used to draw the eye to where the photographer wants it to be and the key is to manually focus on that area and use a wide aperture (so that more light comes through the lens). The numbers are a bit counter-intuitive as, for example, f4 is a wider aperture than f16.

One thing to bear in mind is that odd numbers are more visually appealing than even numbers, hence three, not two or four, pieces of fruit.

Camera settings were 100 ISO (the lower the ISO the better the image quality), f4 at 1/20 second.

If you’d like any free help with DIY photography given that we’re still in lockdown please do get in touch; I’d be happy to help.

Antony