The Sunday Recap is Nika’s review of the week’s lesson. I look at this as kind of the instructor’s review of my work. So, in Nika’s words…

It has been a fantastic week! We have had more than 80 people sign up to participate and we have several submissions of image sets at the flickr Food Photo 101 group. We have gotten so many lovely emails that have thanked us for starting this series. Thank you for your support.There are quite a few sites out there that do pointers and such for food photography but I think that this series has one huge difference - You! Because we are working through this together this will be a much more interesting process. I can’t thank you all enough for participating.Curt has crafted an amazing newsletter that you can get at this link (pending) in which he reviews his lesson outcomes and that of some of the other participants. Curt has done an amazing job of taking this first lesson to heart and really going analytical.

Some notes first

At the outset, I have to say that the lesson was “simplified” in one way - I had you set your non-testing settings to auto. This is flawed in a way because the auto implies that the auto setting will vary to compensate in some way as you change the other settings, depending on the camera’s algorithms. I didn’t want the lesson to become this massive matrix of different conditions.

Someone on the blog asked what a DSLR is. I have been compiling a glossary, that may be helpful. A digital single-lens reflex camera (digital SLR or DSLR) is a digital camera that uses an automatic mirror system and pentaprism to direct light from the lens through the viewfinder. The non-DSLR shows on the LCD what is hitting the sensor.

Analysis

Click this link to see his set with better resolution Read the rest of this entry »

Nika put together a great lesson for our first week. This is the second part of these lessons. After getting Nika’s lesson, I’m going through them, then posting the results.

Why?

I’ve seen a lot of tips on different sites where photographers listed things to do. I haven’t seen someone that’s not a photographer (like me) go through the tips and show their results. I’m not always going to get fantastic results, I’m sure. I hope to show progress, and hopefully have others taking the class see that they don’t have to be experts to get good results from their cameras. I’m also looking forward to seeing what others come up with in their blogs and in our Food Photo 101 forum and Flickr group.

On to the lesson! I can honestly say I hadn’t taken the trouble to just play around with a setting at a time; I’ve done a lot of post processing to get settings the way I wanted them. I’m not going to act like I have it all together during this all the time. The first thing I realized is that I had no idea where my camera manual was. Never fear, though… I googled the camera (it happens to be a Fuji S5000 P&S for now), and I found the manual online. I’ve printed it off so I can keep it around and looks stuff up easily.I have usually taken photos, at least lately, in Aperture Priority, which, on this camera, means that I can set the aperture, but everything else is set by the camera. For Lesson 1, I put the camera in manual mode to start. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Food Photo 101 is started, I still don’t want to stop cooking and talking about cooking. With that, I realized I still haven’t posted about the bread I made for the wine party we had a couple of weeks ago.

The foie gras I made gave me the opportunity to try a new kind of bread, brioche. What is brioche? For those that don’t know that it’s a little slice of buttery heaven, here’s a formal definition:

bri·oche /ˈbrioʊʃ, -ɒʃ; Fr. briˈɔʃ/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[bree-ohsh, -osh; Fr. bree-awsh

n. A soft, light-textured bread made from eggs, butter, flour, and yeast and formed into a roll or a bun.

Really, that lists things in the wrong order; butter should be the first thing, because this bread is loaded with it! There’s almost as much butter as there is flour in this recipe.

I made the Rich Man’s Brioche, though there were 2 other versions, each with different levels of butter, adding other dairy to compensate (and be less costly when butter was harder to procure).

Read the rest of this entry »

With this being the first Food Photo 101 lesson (yea!), and on Tuesday, this is Nika’s lesson that I’ll be following with my results on Thursday. So keep in mind that these are Nika’s words, not mine:

Click here for a printable PDF version of this post

(Kiwano Horned Melon, shot with a 4 MP Fujifilm Finepix S3100) Welcome to all of you following along!

I would like to thank each of you for writing to us about your interest in this project. Curt and I have been overwhelmed by the response, making us feel even more inspired.

Rationale:

As I mentioned in the first post in this series (Food Photo 101: Photography for Foodies), I strongly believe that there is quite a lot of capability in your average low-cost digicam or Point & Shoot (P&S) camera.

Why?

Because I was able to get some interesting images with my P&S by doing a few very fundamental things, other than pointing and shooting. For example, I shot the photo above with my 4 MP Fujifilm Finepix S3100 (bought the camera for about $250.00 in 2005, I think). Another image from the same series and camera is shown below.

(Kiwano Horned Melon, shot with a 4 MP Fujifilm Finepix S3100) Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know why I got this in mind to try, but it was kind of fun; for a week at the beginning of the month of October, I asked several people to take photos of all of their meals for the week. Originally, I was going to post the photos of just one meal, but I ended up asking for a picture of each meal, on random days.

My wife picked the days. We ended up with Tuesday’s breakfast, Wednesday’s lunch and Sunday’s dinner. Here are the results, starting with mine:

Breakfast on Tuesday was a simple iced coffee and Egg McMuffin from, you know it, McDonald’s. The view out the windshield is just on the edge of the town were I live. And since I have a rule of no eating in the car, I stood outside the car while I ate the Egg McMuffin.

Lunch was just a quick bowl of beef stew that I picked up at the cafe at the office. It came with cornbread and was actually pretty decent. The people that sit around me thought it was funny that I put down cloth napkins to cover up my desk when i was taking photos of lunches all week!

We were in Pittsburgh on Sunday, and dinner was at Primanti Brothers in Oakland. I had a cheesesteak sandwich, and their sandwiches include fries and slaw right on the sandwich.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or… “How To Make Your Food Look As Good As It Tastes”.

We’re gearing up to start our online adventure in food photography. Nika of Nika’s Culinary has set up a forum for the ‘class’ here. Also, there’s a Flickr group called Food Photo 101.

We’re really hoping for participation. If you haven’t seen Nika’s work, check out her photos here. I’m really excited that she agreed to do this, and I’m looking forward to learning a lot. I stole this info from her post:

Course Objective:

To guide interested budding food photographers through the technical and creative barriers they may be experiencing with their Point and Shoot (P&S) or DSLR cameras.

We will cover:

• hardware (cameras, lighting, computers, other tech)
• software (capture and post processing tools)
• wetware (food styling)
• creative aspects (composition, lighting dynamics, etc)

Philosophy:

• We are going to do this in a way that, we hope, gives you something you can use right away.
• It’s important for people to not feel “disadvantaged” by having a P&S beause these cameras actually have quite a lot of capability that many people never really explore.
• We will cover topics in a way that hopefully makes you feel more comfortable with your P&S or DSLR.

Reading Materials:

There is ONE book to read, slowly, cover to cover. This would be the MANUAL to your camera. Read it several times and have it on hand whenever you are shooting your food or other subjects (maybe not at the theme park, but at home).  Simply reading it is a start but purposeful practice (fiddling) will pay off more than 100%, I promise you.

Methods - the logistics of the Photography for Foodies series are as follows:

• Each entry will be about one aspect of food photography, and when it makes sense, the topics will build on each other.
• We’ll explain the topic, and Nika will go into how to achieve the results for that topic.
• Once Nika goes through the topic, I will then try to go through the lesson, showing not just the how-to part, but the how-did part (or didn’t!).

Timing:

Nika will post her lessons on Tuesdays at both sites, and I will post my results late on Thursdays (Wednesay nights are full for me). If others have results, we’ll do a weekly roundup on Sundays of what we’re hearing from any of you that participate. Also, if you do your own post on your blog about the class, let one of us know so we can link to it.

If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter for the class, you can register below. Put “Food Photo 101″ as the subject, and you’ll get signed up.