I am a big fan of the Strobist blog. It's one of my favorite sources of info on equipment, techniques and up and coming commercial photographers. OK enough gushing. The neat thing is the assignments. They are usually commercially themed, clearly explained, you submit your image to Flickr and there you go. You end up staring at a few hundred awesome images from photographers all over the world, including a lot of pros. You might even win a prize.
This time the theme was "Food". So I submitted an image of a pile of tomatoes. The set up was easy: main backlight (softboxed ABs) and 2 focused accent lights, one on the knife blade (bounced on a small card) and the other on the spices in the background. Water drops and a temperature shift give it a warm slightly vintage "shiny" look. I took a few shots with my 24-70 Canon (f4, 50mm, ISO100) AND with my brand new Lensbaby 2.0. I liked the LensBaby, but I 'd suggest to shoot product tethered with it as the soft spot is small even at f8-10. The bokeh is fun and quite suggestive of motion. (it's the image on the left and I know tomatoes do not move). I am looking into getting the Lensbaby 3, which has a focus lock. One could step up getting a Canon Tilt Shift, I have also seen good reviews about arax.com...
