Dried Mango

I know. It's not a catchy title, but it gets the point across.

It wasn't just a case of showing off the fruit of my labour (lousy pun fully intended). I wanted to practise using flash compensation and white balance adjustment that I was reading about in my new camera book. These are not new concepts to me, but I haven't taken full advantage of them even though my camera is very well equipped to handle them. Too well equipped in some ways. It can do so much that I tend to balk at using some of the nifty stuff and just go for automatic settings.
I have no excuse.
My first 35 mm SLR camera was fully manual. You had to do everything yourself and understand focal lengths, shutter speeds, apertures, depth of fields, etc., etc., to take every single photo. My flash unit was just as basic and so I had to read the distance on the lens after I had carefully focused and use that as a guide to set the camera's aperture for every flash photo. The flash unit had no adjustments at all.
Somehow I found that easier than the automatic everything that my Nikon does. Strange? Maybe I'm just a product of my generation.
Anyway back to the mango . . . I'm not a food stylist, otherwise I would probably have sprayed it with glycerin to give it a nice moist shine. That might have helped the photo but it wouldn't have helped my mango. I would have several different light sources and I would have arranged the pieces very carefully like a hair dresser preparing a coiffure. Instead, I've just slightly tweaked the white balance (so that the colours are true to life), and added a tiny bit of flash to lighten the shadows. I think it could have done with more flash as the shadows still seem too obvious.
It's a start.
Nanny M D - this will be your mango as soon as I get around to vac packing it and sending it :)