Midnight Cooking – By Márton Gorka

This post is one of my first guest posts ever to diyphotographystuff.info. Its written by Márton Gorka (facebook page) a Hungarian amateur photographer who’s images I saw on flickr and asked him to share some of his wisdom with you guys.

The image idea first came up when I saw a Benoit Linard image doing something similar on other site, he used flour and I decided to try create something with the same mood. I wanted to capture an illusion of pouring flour (white) as the background is dark black that’s where the name (“midnight cooking”) for that setup came from. So lets start!

The ingredients:

Saucepan – I used a saucepan, but any type of tank will suite this.
Flour
Whisker – You can use other kitchen gadgets.
Something to hold the whisker in place
Black cardboard (backdrop, flags) – if you have a enough room behind the scene you might skip it as the background will stay dark.
Tripod – something has to hold the camera…
Flash (I used two) –

The setup:

Building the seup I used some wood poles, taped together with some duct tape, I actually ordered some lighting stands from eBay, but didn’t imagine how long the shipping time will take, so I had to improvise… The whisker hanged down of a wooden structure I put together, I have the impression you guys can find more ways to hold the whisker, just be creative!

I used a black plain piece of cardboard as a the background for the scene and placed the saucepan

just under the whisker.

I used here two budget flashes and positioned them the way you can see in the setup image:

CY-20 with a diy snoot set at full power, as it has no power control it was relatively “far” behind the whisker. Aimed behind the whisker.I triggered this one with a radio trigger.
Nissin Di622 – also with a snoot set to 1/16th full power and in front of the whisker.No trigger needed here, as the Nissin has an optical slave sensor.
You’d have to play with your flashes to get the best light control you plan.

Basic camera settings and gear used:

Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: F22
ISO: 200
Focal length: 50mm
Camera: Canon 40d + 50 F1.8

As youl’d do in any situation, started to play with the caemra and flash settings until I got my desirred image. Pressing the shutter with one hand and pouring the flour with the other. Some really basic Image editing done with GIMP (convertiong to B&W and some curves&sharpening ).