I needed a shot of some cherries for an upcoming episode of our vidcast, Travel by the Pint, today so we made a quick run down to the local grocery store and picked up a bag. Back in the “studio” (more of a spare bedroom, really), I set up a small light table left over from slide sorting days and leaned a large piece of light blue paper up about three feet behind it to give a nice color contrast to the red and yellow fruit.

I placed three cherries on the lightbox and turned it on. A window to the left added a highlight to the upper left side of the cherries but didn’t light the background paper enough to balance the brightness of the lightbox. I popped up the on-board flash on the D700 and used it in commander mode to control my SB600 which I held over the cherries, pointing toward the backdrop. I had a diffusion dome on the flash to help soften and even out the background light and it also added another little highlight to the top of the cherries.

Shooting with a Nikkor 60mm macro lens, I set the aperture to f/8 to ensure the cherries would be in focus but the background would be softly blurred. I also wanted the black edge of the lightbox to be out of focus so that it would become an abstract stripe rather than a recognizable piece of metal edging.

I shot several other versions — and this is actually not the one we’ll use — but I thought I’d share it here as an example of how a few items from around the office can come together for make a quick graphic image. All in all, the whole shoot took maybe 15 minutes. And I end up with some nice stock images and a snack for later.