Hi everyone! My name is Krisnha. My pic “Milk & Cookies” was the lead photo on the December 13, 2015 Reader Photos Roundup. Eric asked me if i want to talked about the picture and a little bit about me for Photography Bay, and without hesitation I said yes.
Let me start a little bit about me. I am from Bali, Indonesia. I used to live in the US but recently I moved back to my country. Photography started as a hobby for me and it grew to a stress reliever, and now I’m a full-time photographer.
I like to experiment on things. I see new technique and I try to copy it with a twist. I see a poster of film I like, I try to emulate it at home. I like using artificial light and a heavy strobist believer (hahaha).
And now about that picture “Milk & Cookies.”
I joined a local strobist group, and every month they challenge the user to make a photo with certain rule, and that month’s the rule is only using one speed light.
With that in mind, I decided to take a picture of splashing milk. I prepared my set up. My camera is a Nikon D750 with 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, my trusty tripod and SB900 speedlight.
For triggering the light, I use CLS (Nikon’s own light system to trigger the light using pop flash on the body or a speed light). Because of only i can use one speedlight, I use a styrofoam board to fill the light on the opposite side of a light source which is a single SB900 speedlight on a white umbrella at 1/16 power. The background is a piece of paper that I hung in back and I used a glass table top for a base to get that reflection. I put my camera on manual mode. Aperture is 2.8, shutter is 1/200 and my ISO is 100.
One thing about the milk, I know I’m gonna waste a lot of it to get the splash that I want, that is why I decided to use mixture of cornstarch and water with a little bit of milk to make the pseudo milk. I make a whole of jug of that (now you know the secret hahahah).
For the splash I threw a tiny rock inside the glass and, at first, I’m doing it all by myself. My left hand is throwing the rock and my right arm pressing the shutter. It was a multifunction work of a mess. Either i get my splash great but not capturing it right, or i capture it right and my splash is a meh (at this time i know i should use a remote release shutter but i can’t find it anywhere on my bag).
So I called in my assistant (my mom actually). I let her to threw the rock while I took the pic. In two shots I get what I want.
Too bad I only copy few of my pictures from that night and I can’t really show you my failed pictures.
And for the post processing, what I did is basically cleaning the image, mask some splash, make the milk POP more by desaturating it and post some highlight, change my background colour (because I think purple is way more interesting) and cropped the picture.
Krisnha has been a long-time member of the Photography Bay Flickr Group and regularly submits awesome photos to the group. You can check out more of his work and follow him here on his Flickr page.
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