Easter Basket with Multi Colored Plastic Eggs This past week we worked on producing some stock images that could be used for Easter.  Linda and I bought some pastel colored plastic eggs, small baskets, and some colored straw.  I made a few arrangements but they all looked terrible.  Linda came to the rescue and got the baskets to look acceptable.

I set up the shoot on our bar and used some white cardboard for both reflectors and a background.  I soon found that any shot that included the background wasn't acceptable.  The white turned grey and muddy looking.  Fairly typical for shooting against a white background.  I decided that the only decent shots would be tight closeups with no background showing.  This improved things greatly.  I used two model lamps, one to the right and one to the left of the subject, and each reflected from above.  I balanced my white reflectors on the rim of the lamps and the knobs of our bar cabitets.  It worked fine.  I also used my flash.  I attached a diffuser and bounced the flash off a third reflector I held over the subject.  I managed to eliminate most shadows but the even the best shots still had unwanted highlight spots on the eggs which I later eliminated in Photoshop.

I'm pleased with the results although I know I could have done better if I had set up my light box.  That might have eliminated the highlight spots.  I guess the bottom line is that iStock accepted all of the images I submitted from that shoot.  They can be seen in my iStock Lightbox entitled Easter.  For those of you who don't know, iStock is a stock photography site with over eight million images to select from.  You can sign up for free and then buy images from the site.

The images can also be seen on this site in my Easter Gallery.