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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Creating the Photograph

Creating the Photograph: Michiel Tersteege’s, “Strawberry Splash”

Chris Gampat
No Comments
05/26/2013
4 Mins read

Final

Editor’s Note: Creating the Photograph is a new series that we’re starting where we interview photographers all about the photo that they shot and talk to them about how it was achieved. The results are some knowledge passed onto you. Want to be featured? Email chrisgampat[at]thephoblographer[dot]com

Splash images are always fun to do and when combined with food, an already delectable morsel can become even more mouth watering. When we found the work of Michiel Tersteege, we were quite taken by how much his “Strawberry Splash” image reminded us of a cool bowl of cereal or strawberries and cream. Tersteege used some strobism to create the image above and also does a lot of it for much of his personal work. He has been an amateur photographer for about six years now and lives in The Netherlands with his wife and two children. Michiel is fixated on always getting the perfect shot that gives him satisfaction. He can spend hours a day to setup a nice lighting to create it–and that’s what he did for this one.

Here’s his story. And if you’re interested check out more in our Creating the Photograph series.

The Concept

It was May of 2012. A couple of days before I took the picture that I saw a similar picture on the internet. My goal was to make a picture like that. It wasn’t easy to do. It took about two of hours and almost a full box of strawberries.

Gear Used

Nikon D300

Sigma 17 – 70 mm f2.8 – 4.5

Nikon SB800

TT520 Flash

Cactus V4

Joby GorillaPod

Vanguard tripod

iMac 27″ with Adobe CS5

Strawberries and milk

The Shoot

setup_photo

First was the background. I wanted a blue background so that the white milk and the red from the strawberry formed a nice contrast with the blue. So I taped some blue paper to the wall and then the experiment began. I took my Joby mini tripod and taped a spoon to it. I filled the spoon completely with milk.

I knew that the wall and floor would become soaked with milk, so I placed garbage bags everywhere I expected the splatter to reach.

Light Setup

LightingSetup

I placed a strawberry in the spoon so that I could first setup the lighting. On the left was a Nikon SB800 at 1/16 power so that the side of the strawberry has nice lighting. Because the background got too much light from the flash, I made a snoot out of black paper so that only the strawberry would get some light. The top of the strawberry was too dark, so I put another flash light (TT520) to light the top, also at 1/16 power. To avoid too much light in the background I put a piece of paper at the side of the flash to block that.

Camara Setup

The camera was on the floor with the Sigma 17 -70mm lens on it. Because I used flash I didn’t want a shutter speed higher than 1/125 of a second due to sync reasons. This gave me an aperture of f8.0. The strawberry is frozen in the picture and the milk has some movement in it. I also didn’t want the camera to become wet, so i’ve used it at 70mm, so that the camera was safe. The camera was in continue setting, so that I could take several pictures in a second. To trigger the flash I used a Cactus V4 set.

Shooting

This was difficult. I had to drop the strawberry and push the shutter button (I didn’t have a remote shutter cable at that time). It is difficult to aim the strawberry exactly straight above the spoon. After a couple of photos I knew this wasn’t going to work. Luckily my wife wanted to help. She dropped the strawberry and I took the photo. Sometimes the strawberry wasn’t visible at all in a sequence of photos. They drop faster than you think. Also, after a couple of drops a strawberry couldn’t be used anymore, because it became bruised. After a while I had a number of good photos to load into the computer. I picked the best one and edited that.

Post Production

Post_1

The photo was out of the camera already good. I opened the photo and changed only the white balance. After that I set the guides to see what area I wanted to keep and finally cropped the photo.

If you make your light setup good, you don’t have to do a lot of post production.

Before and After

Original
Before
Final
After

For more, be sure to visit Michiel’s personal website, flickr, 500px, and twitter.

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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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