Creative Flash Photography

Workshop 31

Glowing Pasta

▸ Another simple but effective light stage effect

▸ How to produce a fiery look

The Setup

The previous workshop used a sheet of plastic as a stage for illuminating the subject from below. This section describes an even simpler way to produce an uplight effect using a slatted wooden shelf.

To set up the shot, I placed the pasta (in this case, large penne noodles) on the boards and put the flash on the shelf below, pointing upward.

Camera Settings and Shooting

I decided to work without ambient light. To do this, I selected an exposure time of 1/125 second, ISO 100 to keep the image noise down, and f/7.1 to provide sufficient depth of field. Due to its proximity to the subject and the lack of additional light modifiers, ...