For this I decided to do something a little more literal then my other contrasts, but I also wanted them to tie together in some way.

What I decided on was to photograph in black & white a lemon being sliced. This was based on a photo of an onion being chopped that I took in Morocco last year. 

The set-up was fairly simple. I bought a couple of lemons and some grapes. At home I had wooden chopping board which I knew would work well in black and white. 

I wanted some interest in the background even though I was planning on only the face of the lemon and the hands being in sharp focus. For this I placed the spare lemon, some grapes and some interestingly shaped bottles with chillies in that are used for decoration in the kitchen. 

My instruction to the person slicing the lemon was simply to go slow and steady and to keep the angle of the knife high. I wanted to shoot as she sliced so I’d get something more natural – even though this was a manufactured scene. 

On the camera I had my 16-85mm VR lens, and a Nikon speedlight with a diffuser attached so that I could soften the light a touch. 

For framing I decided to place the lemon just off centre, and using the hand plus knife to drag the eye towards the lemon. The background interest gives something else to look at before returning to the main subject which is out sour lemon. 

Sweet

For sweet I’d planned to take a portrait style shot of a glass of coke, replete with straw and a freshly cut slice of lemon. However, this just didn’t really work as the coke just looked black, flat and unappealing.

Instead what I did was to shoot the glass from directly overhead so we see the round aperture of the glass looking almost as a hole. I placed the glass onto a plain white piece of card, and then to tie the image with the ‘sour’ image I placed a piece of lemon flat into the glass. 

My own preference is for images that are predominately light, or predominately dark. With this in mind I left a large amount of white space in the image for no reason other then it ‘feeling’ better that way. 

One nice effect is that the lemon effectively made semi circle out of the glass, so we have circles within circles which is a nice parallel with the logo that I use to watermark my shots.