The following sliced fruits shots tutorial is by photographer and artist William van der Steen.

The tutorial will take you step by step toward creating an image similar to that wonderful sliced up banana.

here we go

Selecting Raw Material

The first thing is to select an object to work with. Any fruit or vegetable can work here, as long as it can be cut in a relatively clean way. Hard fruits and vegetables are the easiest to use. After I decided what kind of fruit or vegetable I’m going to use, I’m going to think about how this object is sliced the best way, some fruit is very soft and that doesn’t give you complete freedom on how to slice it.

Working Towards The Final Image

We need a way to make the fruit pieces seem like they fly in mid air. Most of the times I use toothpicks to hold the parts together. Later, those will be removed in editing.

The best way to place the fruit and toothpicks in space is to imagine what it would look like when the toothpicks are removed.

The next step is to carefully add the toothpicks, first to balance the fruit, then to add all the flying bits & pieces.

Some fruits and vegetables look best when they are wet. If you so desire, you can spray some water to make them look fresher.

Lighting

There are a few ways to light such a scene. I use a light tent to get some good diffused light. Actually, the tent is a simple cardboard box with holes and sketching paper on the sides and paper on the back. Building one is a quick and fun project.

In the setup that I use I have two halogen lights to light the tent. While the tent itself provides some diffusion, I bounce the light on the back and ceiling to get even more diffused light.

Try to place your object in a way that you don’t have to remove too much shadow from your toothpicks. Shadows are always hard to clone (remove) in photoshop especially when they have a soft border.

Post

Once I have a good image to work with, I’ll do some editing o Photoshop.

Aside some basic levels and color correction I need to remove the toothpicks. This is done by cloning close by object. If you’ve never done this thing before, there is a great and funny cloning tutorial here.

Just to get some creative juices flowing, here are some of my sliced fruit images along with the magic-removed images. (Hover for before/after images)