Looks delicious, right? And it was.
On Monday I ended up to give photography tips to two food bloggers. I just love bloggers enthusiasm towards photography –they just shoot and shoot. They already know their problems and they want to have straight and detailed advice. Keep it simple and straightforward.
I was invited to Johanna’s home in Pori. Her blog “Life between stove and wineglass” presents delicious recipes and tips for wine, and between, some personal projects. Another blogger Anna presents her lovely cakes and bakings in her blog “Sugar Crumbs“. We began day by tasting one of Johanna’s new recipes: delicious muffins with chorizo and blue cheese. Great start 😀
Even though it was morning and we got some daylight, we closed all the curtains and demonstrate how to shoot, you don’t have enough daylight. Very common situation for bloggers, especially if you live in Finland and shoot after work.
If you shoot in the the evening without any daylight, it helps, if you have at least one additional light source.
I used Dedolight Felloni LED-panel (30×30 cm). LED-panel is continuous light source – light illuminates continuously and you can see it all the time. Dedolight Felloni’s advantage is that it’s bicolor, so you can change it’s color temperature from 5 600 K to 3 200 K. And of course you can dim it too. Dedolight is professional light source and one choice for it in aficionados use can f.e. Yongnuo LED-panel. Yongnuo you can have in different sizes and you change color temperature by adding gel in front of panel.
It all started from composing. Even though Johanna said that normal situation is: she has cooked, kids are crying for food and she still should shoot food for her blog. We took appr. an hour to compose “English breakfast” on Johanna’s table 🙂
I was missing my white board and all markers –didn’t really matter…
Our goal for the day was to shoot: sharp enough and right color enough photos. We also wanted to have more lighted and photographic images.
In first demonstration I used white balance 3 200K and camera was attached to tripod. Dedolight Felloni was addtional light souce (setting: 3 200 K).
Johanna’s home was perfect for photography course. There was plenty of room and we were able to shoot in various spots. Next demonstration I made in the kitchen were she usually shoot.
My aim was to demonstrate how to shoot in daylight, and how to take into a consideration background’s distance from main subject. When background is far enough away from main subject you can control depth-of-field better.
Again we took some time to make composition. In demo it’s easy because we saw live view -image all the time from laptop screen.Canon 6D has build-in wifi and connects to EOS Utility wirelessly. If you have other camera model, you can attach it to laptop, TV-screen or old computer screen with RCA- or HDMI -cable. Live view -image helps you ENORMOUSLY.
In first example image I focused to wine bottle, because wine is one of the key elements is Johanna’s blog. In this image I used only daylight and white balance was set to 5 500K.
Image of the pie shows how you can vary cropping and main subject from same shooting spot after you have checked camera settings and direction of available light. And this pie -more that delicious 🙂 OMG. Hopefully we’ll get the recipe soon.
Normally in locations there are mixture of different light conditions. Here there’s daylight (appr. 5 500K) and tungsten light (appr. 2700 – 2900K).
Finally we remembered to light candles 🙂 I changed white balance to 3 200K because I wanted to have pie as main subject and it was under halogen spots. Pie looks fresh, delicious and it’s colors appears right. And daylight gives image nice bluish hue to background.
After all demonstrations we of course practiced. We put all the camera settings right and took images.
… and checked them. And shot again.
Last demonstration was to point out how to make more graphic images of food. I also wanted to demonstrate nature of light.
Composition again…
Live view -image is useful to have black-and-white. Then you can see lights and shadows instead of colors. In camera setting you can change screen’s mode to black-and -white (in Canon it’s “Picture Settings”.)
We compared two different exposures, nature of shadows and compositions.
At this point coincidence came along –sun came out. Upper image was taken when it was cloudy. Light is softer, and shadows are soft too. You hardly see line between light and shadow.
When sun came out -light changed harder and same happened to shadows. Then it’s photographer’s choice what kind of nature of light he/she wants to use.
We thought hot and spicy carrot soup (recipe) is great winter food. When image looks more like it’s taken in bright winter day (=direct sunlight, hard light, hard shadows), it’s great for this image.
I changed shooting angle and made one more image.
In this angle some parts of white plate stay in shadow. I used white polystyrene foam to reflect some light to shadows parts. Plate appeared more brighter.
Other reason to change shooting angle was to get soups surface to appear more glossy.
In upper image nature of light is still direct sun light, but there are times when you don’t want to use it… it just makes too much trouble…
We attached white diffuser material between light source and food. Johanna holds white disposable bed sheet between window and food. You can see the difference in soup’s surface and spoon.
So how to shoot better food images? Repeat, repeat and repeat. End of the day we sat down one more time and went through all images one more time.
Finally it was time for group picture. And it wasn’t very short project 🙂 But it’s understandable we werent’ talking about posing today 🙂
Thanks for everyone 🙂
Johanna was assisting me all day and she took all making of -images. Recipes for muffins, pie and soup you can find from another Johanna’s blog “Life between stove and wine glass”. And if you want to have beautiful and delicious cakes, check “Sugar Crumbs“.
