Tiberio and I did another La Figa shoot last weekend, this time with a much curvier model than we have shot to date, and the results were phenomenal. After a series of very high key shoots with the white seamless paper background, I felt drawn back to the black velvet backdrop. The black velvet gives a totally different effect than the black paper (which can be seen in our Strawberries Redux shoot). The black paper can be anywhere from medium gray to almost black, depending on what you do with the lighting. The black velvet on the other hand reflects almost no light at all, so as long as you don’t light it directly, it pretty much disappears from the shot.

Here is one of the lighting set-ups I used. Note that the big softbox on the right is turned off – this is just a two light arrangement. A strip softbox coming in from the left, and a gridspot coming down from above and behind…

(click for larger versions)…

Here are a couple shots showing what I got with this set-up…

The first food arrangement we did involved melon…

But the really good stuff we got involved radishes. The results were spectacular – expect to see one of our final images from this arrangement on the wall at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival…

Our model brought along a friend who happens to be a talented photographer by the name of Jason Wolf, so we actually got some behind the scenes shots of me for a change…