Dogwood Week 6 - Artistic - Candy

For the week 6 challenge, I wanted to use the lightbox that I had purchased for my wife to take photographs of the cards she makes. The challenge was to take a photo of candy in an artistic way and I figured some closeups with a white background might look great.

I played around with setting my DSLR to manual and reversing my 50mm lens to take some faux-macro images. Some of them worked out better than others, and you really had to pay attention to what you had in focus. I shot some cinnamon hearts in this way but ultimately felt that there was too much red in the image. Plus I felt like I was getting a headache from a bit of eye strain.

Then I moved onto the second bag of candy that I had purchased. (My kids loved me a little extra that day.) I first tried shooting a few shots of a pile, but then I started sitting the candy hearts up in staggered rows. I finally created the image below which I was happy with after trying a few different angles and focus points.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 85mm
ISO - 5000
Exposure - 1/160 sec.
Flash - Dd not fire