A high key still life of oranges and pomegranates. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm at 65mm f/6.3 1.250

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

-Edouard Manet

I have always liked the effect of producing high key still life images and I wanted to try and produce one myself. I set up a white background on our kitchen table and pulled out some fruit and a white plate. I started with setting up a manual exposure on the camera that would eliminate all ambient light. Basically I took pictures without flash and reduced the exposure until the picture was almost black, this indicates that there is no ambient light hitting the sensor. Then I started to add flash. In order to make the background disappear. I had to put a significant amount of light on it. The background itself was not pure white, it was an off-white linen kind of material I increased the power on the flash until the background turned pure white and the texture disappeared. Then I added another flash below the camera pointing directly at the fruit. I had a small fabric lightbox on this flash and I increased the power until I got nice highlights from the orange. Overall I was pretty happy but I would like to have been able to eliminate the shadows in the foreground.

-Russell Berg