The Fool’s Circle Photo Blog

Photo Details:
Camera: Nikon D80

F-Stop: f/3.5
Focal Length: 105 mm
Exposure Bias: +0.3ev
Speed: 1/60
ISO: 400

Untitled originally uploaded by foolscircle.

I apologize for the awful pun-y title; I just happen to like the song “Two Piña Coladas” by Garth Brooks and the damn thing’s been stuck in my head for the past couple of days.

Anyway, I shot this photo for an article about drinks at the local hotspots in Walnut Creek Magazine. The margarita in question came from Maria Maria, a Mexican restaurant owned by Carlos Santana (who, strangely enough, lived about a mile or so down the road from my house in the 1980s). Anyway, when you’re shooting photos of drinks, it’s a bit of a challenge to make them an interesting subject because they often are surrounded by a far more attention-grabbing environment, instead.

Margarita glasses are not terribly interesting on their own, mainly because they’re rather generic; to me, it’s the texture that makes a margarita visually appealing. As a result, I snapped off a number of different photos with both my wide-angle and fisheye lenses, and then I decided to play around a little with my macro lens.

One of my new toys has been the SB-R200 wireless remote speedlight, which is easily one of the coolest photo gizmos around because (a) it makes lighting macro shots so easy and (b) it looks really cool when you attach it to a camera lens. In this case, I rotated the lights around to one side and angled them so they created a nifty uplighting effect for this shot. I’m particularly fond of the way the salt looks in this image.

The R200 is something I’d really recommend to anyone who’s looking for the equivalent of a ringlight system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with a 72mm adapter, so I can’t use it on one of my wide-angle lenses (I use an 18-200mm and 24-120mm lens, respectively). However, I have an older 52mm lens that I’m planning to use with the light system in order to try some new lighting techniques for a portrait or two.