Testing aperture and backgrounds with Soda Bread.

I’m in the process of setting up a workable home studio, so this was a nice quick test to figure out what I’m missing, what’s working, and what best practices to introduce to my workflow.

The setup.

Soda bread and butter is a simple favourite, everybody’s Granny has the best ever recipe. I thought the best way to show it would be with a much texture as possible, which meant slicing, crumbling, and buttering all visible in the final shot. Seeing depth is important for this texture, so I popped the camera on tripod at a fairly eye-level angle (if looking at the bread on a table for example). Lighting is from the back right, quite direct and hard to pick up the bread texture and add a sunny warmth to the image.

First off I wanted to test some different apertures to see how varying depth of field would affect the feel of the image.

Aperture tests.

Shooting at a roughly 45-degree angle with focus on the buttered slice, I was interested to see if a shallow or wide depth of field would tell the story best. In the end, I preferred the shallowness of a wide aperture, it brings attention to the main elements and adds to the buttery feel with a good smooth background.

Background choices.

Final image.

Thinking that wide open at f/1.4 was a bit too much, I settled on f/2.0.

Thoughts: The composition is alright, but I could do with some better textures and colour additions. Really want some rough wood and concrete tabletops to bring a more natural feel to the image. The dark wood was my favourite of this bunch.