Here we have Nika’s review of my work for Food Photo 101 Lesson 2, along with several others that are following along…

This week we had quite a few people contribute their results to the Food Photo 101 flickr pool.

I am going to go through Curt’s results as well as those of the other participants, which include:

• LaRecetteDuJour
• Vegan Noodle
• Big Mill BB

Lets start with Curt’s work

In the series of images below you can see his set up and bounces on the bottom row and a series of shots on a tabletop with various permutations of bounce and mirror/foil.

I have put a blue circle over the shot with his set up and a red circle over the shot with no bounce.

This next series of shots shows, at the bottom, the conditions which Curt liked the most out of the first batch. I have put an orange circle over those.

You can see how he was experimenting with using the foil to focus some sharp light on different parts of the subject across those two shots.

I think that I would like to see two separate foils aiming on the two different regions that he was aiming at, all in one photo. Also, he could move the background back so that there is not the slightly distracting silhouette in the background. One other nitpicky thing, he could avoid the sharp shadows on the right by buffering or screening his light source on the left.

In this same series we see his on-black shots. Once again, I have put a blue circle over the starting conditions, no bounce. I have put a green circle over the shot that Curt liked the most.

This is a tough subject to light on a black background because it’s black jacket disappears. This likely won’t be the case with foods (how many foods are deep velvet black?) but a rim light (some sharp light from the back) would separate the subject from the black. He found that moving the foil in closer gave him a greater amount of light.

This is a nice illustration of something called the inverse square law (see glossary).

In short it is:

“The intensity (or illuminance or irradiance) of light or other linear waves radiating from a point source (energy per unit of area perpendicular to the source) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source; so an object (of the same size) twice as far away, receives only 1/4 the energy (in the same time period).

Photographers and theatrical lighting professionals use the inverse-square law to determine optimal location of the light source for proper illumination of the subject.” (learn more)

Thus, he was able to gain some intensity by bringing it in closer. When you use lighting, as you move it about, its not a 1:1 ratio between 2 feet away and 4 feet away. At 2 feet you have, say, 1 unit of illumination. When you move it to 4 feet you do not have 0.5 units of illumination, you have 0.25 units.

In the last set, shown below, Curt uses an all white background to further explore light bouncing.

In this series, the shot that Curt liked the most (with the orange circle) is one where he used no foil or mirror and just the foam core. I agree with him.

It looks like it gave him more fill on the front right parts of the face and eggs with none of the silhouetting he was getting with the foil and mirror.

I thought that Curt did a tremendous job of going through the various combinations. I cant wait to see how he uses this on food!

LaRecetteDuJour

Lets move on now to the work submitted by LaRecetteDuJour, our faithful classmate from France!

She too did an excellent job of going through various combinations of bounce and background. We can see a series of her images below.

A green circle is over her kit of bouncers, a lot of work there, great job!

The upper set is of the subjects on a white background. I have put a blue circle over the photo where no bouncing was done.

I think I would suggest two things: combine the two images in the orange circle and also make the primary light less harsh, perhaps a sheet of thin cotton. We will talk more about those sorts of things later.

Next, she worked on the on-black background. I put a blue circle over the starting conditions. She next used a foil bounce and then varied the exposure to -2 (orange circle).

I think that was a good idea because we were seeing so much detail of the black cloth. It made the background fall away and isolate the subjects but did decrease the brightness of the subject. She could go in with photoshop and selectively lighten up the subjects.

Vegan Noodle

Vegan Noodle, hailing from the sunny land of ground control (AKA Houston, TX), gave us a series of shots of meyer lemons. You can see her discussion on this work at her blog post “Lemon Light” on her blog - walking the vegan line.

I show this series below.

Blue circle over starting conditions, yellow over my preference of the lemons on the wood, and green for the one that VN liked the best. If you go to that blog post you will see that she preferred the black background the most. It definitely has some great qualities. I would suggest that she re-work this lighting where there is no direct overhead lighting but a key (main) light to one side and bounce on the other.

Great work!

Big Mill BB

Chloe, who runs a Bread & Breakfast called Big Mill B&B in North Carolina, also has a blog, Chloe’s Blog from Big Mill, where you can see what she is cooking up for her guests!

She submitted some photos of this fantastic wine glass that I would ban from our house because the kids would trash it in a second, I just know it!

She chose a hard subject because glass on different backgrounds and with different bouncers can behave very differently than non-glass items.

You can look at the various photos and decide for yourself on your favorite but I am really liking the one that I put an orange circle over. It has great reflections. There is something about the black background that really brings out so many details over the white background.

Amazing work!

I think that each of you have done a great job showing how you experimented with the conditions and the bounce. I look forward to seeing what this does for some of the food photos you have in your pipeline. Always feel free to put those photos in the flickr Food Photo 101 group pool!

Finally, I wanted to show something I did this week that used some of these techniques.

Since I live up north (like Curt), I lose the light really early and the light all day comes in at an oblique angle (until the summer when it is more perpendicular). The oblique angle makes for some really harsh light.

So, to make a long story short, some time ago I invested in a daylight balanced strobe (Alien Bees AB800) with a “giant” softbox.

I had been less than happy with my results with this strobe but with the lack of light I have decided to beat my lighting demons and try to find a set up that works with this light source that I can use any time of day.

Below you can see some eggs. They are lit by the strobe in the upper left corner. I am bouncing with a styrofoam block on the bottom right. I used my tripod and also my Canon 30D. I was working so fast that I didn’t take the time to shoot with my P&S, sorry!

Here is the set-up shot where you can see my light source on the left and the styrofoam bounce on the right. Don’t look at the mess please! I took these with my fujifilm with the flash and it hard a HARD time focusing. Sorry about that.

Related Posts:

• Food Photo 101-2: Photonic Inspirations
• Food Photo 101-2: Curts Results
• Food Photo 101-2: Harnessing Photons
• FP101-1: Week 1 in review
• Food Photo 101: Photography for Foodies
• Food Photo 101-1
• Food Photography 101: Lesson 1 results

Class Resources

• Curt’s Food Photo 101 page
• My Food Photo 101 page
• Food Photo 101 Class Forum
• Food Photo 101 Glossary
• Food Photo 101 Flickr Group
• Food Photo 101 Newsletters

To register for the newsletter that reviews each week’s topic, fill out the contact form at the bottom of this post (or on the Food Photo 101 page) and type “Food Photo 101” in the subject field.

Lesson 2 was all about directing light. I was hoping to have some good morning light again, as the time change means that it’s too dark when I get home to have much light coming into the dining room. Unfortunately, mornings this week have been cloudy, so not much luck for me having good natural light.

I want to thank Nika for another great lesson… This one will prove to be really useful right from the start.

I figured this was a good way to try out how white balance would need to change for the light in the dining room, and I ended up with using the ‘Incandescent setting’.

Task 1: My Light Bouncing Equipment

I mostly used foamcore. This is can be found at art supply stores, and it bascially posterboard glued to a white styrofoam core, which gives some stiffness so it will stand up without bending.

I picked up a few sheets of foamcore: 3 white, 2 black and one kind of a silvery grey. I also took a piece of cardboard and wrapped it with aluminum foil and snagged a mirror my wife had under her sink in the bathroom. I have some cheap lights that I can use, too, with translucent umbrellas, and my camera tripod made it into the shot a bit, too.

The problem with the lights I have is that the bulbs are too stark in color. I really need to replace them with more natural light bulbs, which shouldn’t be too difficult. I got 3 tripods (2 tall, 1 short) with 2 translucent umbrellas for something like $50 on ebay to use for photos, and they do pretty well for my needs right now.

So that’s my light bouncing stuff!

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for for the 2nd lesson in Food Photo 101! Without further ado, here it is, in Nika’s words:

Welcome back!

I was so impressed by all of the work you all did on the last lesson, great job!We have begun to familiarize ourselves with our cameras with the last exercise (Food Photo 101: First Principles), putting your hands to work on the settings and knobs and dials and such. Its ok if it still feels overwhelming because familiarity through practice is the only way to master these things.

For me, as I put this course together, I feel this tension between getting people started on basics and helping people keep motivated by seeing improvement in their photos immediately. Today’s lesson should yield some positive changes for you.

So, in today’s second Food Photo 101 class we are taking a break from the camera-geek-speak!

(Cheers heard from the balcony)

We are also not going to be camera-specific. These ideas are common to any format, be it pin-hole, digicam, DSLR, Medium Format, Large Format, etc.

We are going to talk about how to harness the light we need to make good photos.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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.