With the right lighting and the right background, this little almond almost looked like a jewel. The intricate design pattern on it and the beautiful light brown texture, all added to its beauty

Photo setup

1. Since this is an extremely close up picture, I had to reverse mount the lens, which means aperture ( which is directly linked to the depth of field) has to be precisely controlled by me. So this was the choice I had to make
   • Open the lens ( large apreture ) and let more light in, but less depth of field, which means most part of the almond will be out of focus ( we are dealing with a round shaped object )
   OR
   • Reduce the aperture, which gives more depth of field, but results in lesser light and therefore overall less quality of the photo
2. Since, on the day of the shoot, the sky was cloudy, thanks to showers in some parts of Bangalore, I could not go ahead with option 2 ( small aperture )
3. I tried several shots, but due to lack of proper sunlight, I could not bring out the details in the almond
4. I chose to go with a balance approach. I set it around half and used an external light source, namely a LED table lamp. I decided that if I required additional light I would compensate by setting a higher exposure ( slow shutter speed )
5. The head of the LED table lamp was kept as close as possible to the almond
6. To compensate the white balance ( bluish tint ) of the table lamp, I used ‘Sun light’ as the white balance source and the final correction was done in post processing ( Adobe Light room )
7. The almond was placed on a velvet box that I got with my wrist watch
8. The blue background is due to the study chair on which the almond was kept
9. To make the almond stand still, I made use of two old ear rings that I found in the house
10. Tried experimenting with different angles, by shifting the camera as well as the almond, until I got the right shot

Details about the image

Post processing

1. No cropping was done
2. Color correction, a little bit more exposure and slightly more shadows
3. As mentioned previously to compensate the blue LED, the image was white balanced to the more natural color of the almond