While out with a friend at the Amish Market in Maryland, I bought some decadent looking chocolate-dipped strawberries. They were so pretty I didn't really want to have them eaten until I could take pictures of them!

I don't carry my "big camera" around with me all the time, and so I was preparing to take my smaller camera out of my purse when my friend offered to let me borrow her camera.

She owns a Canon Rebel XTi, and so I said "sure!" I've never shot with a Rebel and it's a camera I've been considering as my secondary camera for a while (although I want to buy the Rebel T1i- click to see).

Her camera was sporting the stock 18-55mm stock lens, and since I didn't want to mess with any of her personal settings, I just put the camera on the little green square, aka "point and shoot" mode.

I moved a stool to the middle of her kitchen, opposite the window so that I could get the best light. The camera (since it was in PaS mode) decided I really, really should use the flash- and that would subsequently overblow any photos I would take.

Personally I have eternally wondered about the flash. Whenever they go off, the people in the photos look like they've been nuked! So, I puckered my head up for a moment, since my friend didn't have any sort of diffuser. But, she DID have paper towels! I took a white paper towel and held it in front of the flash and voila! Instant diffusion. I had enough light, and all the pictures didn't look all shadowed and unnaturally lit.

My friend obligingly grabbed a bottle of wine off the top of the refrigerator and set it next to the strawberries, which I'd plopped into a bowl.

I'd like you to notice that all these pictures were done completely spontaneously, without studio lighting, and they were propped up on top of a stool in the middle of the kitchen... and they look great! It's not difficult to take nice photos like these, even with a point-and-shoot (which I was simulating with the mode the camera was in).

All the strawberries were shot with the Rebel XTi, on PaS mode, with a paper towel in front of the flash. Nice, huh? I didn't remove the background or add extra blur or anything crazy like that- that's how they looked when I took them.

I was then inspired. Once I got home, I decided I'd take more pictures of food I had in the kitchen.

When an artist is first beginning to draw, the first thing they do is the still life, since fruit and things will sit politely for hours while you sketch it. I've never actually taken pictures of random fruits and vegetables before, and so I pulled out my lightbox and put it on my dining room table.

This particular lightbox is a small 24"x24" cube with two lamps. You can get this same very inexpensive set up from Amazon (click here!). It comes with a white background, a blue background, a black background, and a green background (for chroma keying).

I took a houselamp and pointed it down at the top so that the box would be nice and lit up for this picture. The house light is yellow... the side lamps are blue. If you don't understand what I mean, all visible light has color. Click here to read about it. Essentially, for a setup like this, you wouldn't want to use both sets of lights while you were actually taking the photo because you've got two different shades of "white" going on (bad!).

Quite a lot of people use a light box like this one (or a smaller one) to get those nifty photos you see on Ebay or Etsy. I have stuffed my cat into the box before (he fit) but this was the first time I'd decided to take photos of fruit. (You can see any of the photos in a larger size by clicking on the photo itself.)

I posed the pears in a variety of ways. I did one, three, and then all six in a wire frame basket.

I realized that fruit is pretty dinked up and not-as-pristine as you normally see it in photos, and decided I liked all the imperfections.

As you can see, the lightbox created the neat "seamless" background you frequently see in photos like this.

I elected to use my longer zoom lens, the 70-255mm because my intention was to zoom tightly into some things.

This required me to stand back about twelve feet, however, because any closer and I couldn't focus. You can't exactly use macro mode with a lens like that :)

This interesting thing isn't quite your normal apple. You may have heard of a Grapple (pronounced "Gray-pple") which is essentially an apple that's been infused with grape juice. It's like a crunchy grape. Pretty interesting!!

Since I was back about ten feet, zooming in to the stem, the background completely disappears and creates that awesome glowy look that everyone tries to photoshop in later.

I didn't in fact photoshop anything. The only adjustments to these photos I did in Aperture 2, and mostly I was cropping things or adjusting the luminance- that was it.

Lastly I decided I wanted to zoom into things that most people never take a good look at. I took close ups of quinoa, oats, coffee beans, coffee grounds, nuts, and pretzels.

The pretzel and other tiny things were a challenge. I finally ended up inverting a small white bowl and putting a clear glass tea plate on top of that. Then I put the pretzel or bean in the center and snapped away. When I was done, I did have to crop the photos, but the effect was of "floating pretzel," which I thought was cool.

It was a bit frustrating at times (the light reflecting off the dimpling in an avocado prevented me from getting a good shot of it close up) but overall I was quite satisfied with my first attempt at "A Still Life".... particularly the part where I got to eat what I was shooting.

If you'd like to have a look at a thumbnail group of all the shots I took during the session (and all the chocolate-dipped strawberry shots), please have a look at my Flickr results here. Clicking on any of the thumbnails will take you to a larger view. Or, feel free to examine them in the viewer below!

Feel free to add to the conversation or ask questions in the comments section by clicking on "add new comment" below!