Pick A Straw by Ngaire Naran

5 questions about this photo:

Q1. What equipment did you use?
I used my Canon 40D camera plus two lights. One was a halogen desk lamp and another a small torch. I used my 50mm f/1.8 lens for this shot - I love this lens as it is so fast and sharp. Because I don't have any off camera flash units, I use torches and lamps for all my lighting and I find that this does the job OK.

Q2. What settings did you have on your camera?
Exposure 1/640 sec, Aperture f/1.8, ISO 100

Q3. What software did you use during the post-production?
Just PICNIK (I have since bought myself Photoshop CS5 but for this shot I just used the editing tools in Picnik)

Q4. What is the subject of the photo?
The subject was a bunch of straws (yellow ones actually!)

Q5. How did you come up with the idea of this shot?
It was one of those days when I still hadn't taken my shot for my 365 project and was running out of inspiration. Often I get ideas from Flickr and as I had seen a few straw shots, that gave me the inspiration I lacked.

So how did I go about taking the shot - well I used a shallow DOF and shone my desk lamp from above - I think sitting on a wooden desk affected the colour further down the straws. I also shone my little torch light at the base of the straws which were sitting in a small glass jar. I had envisaged the shot coming out differently, but then thought that this foggy effect looked OK.

While I was in Picnik adding the frame, I thought, "hmm, what else can I play around with here?" So I ended up inverting the shot and then playing around with the tint... and that is what I ended up posting.