o hai optic nerds,
This may be one of my last updates from the studios at Humber North, but boy was it a good session. We got to eat! Well, it was questionable at first whether we were permitted to eat…
This lighting setup was very interesting. Instead of having multiple lights, I used the power of the reflector. It’s not just a Kierkegaard thing, or a sweet Arcade Fire album. It’s actually what allowed me to light my fruit and pastries with only one dull key light.
building a reflector fortress, foto by RobbyC, edited by APG
My concept was a picnic, so I used my paisley patterned bandana to frame the fruit and pastry. The underneath gold reflector did very well at minimizing shadows and looked great underneath the purple bandana.
gold reflector, tasty treats
I like fancy food photography, but it’s not consonant with my character or interests. The best was seeing what everyone else was doing. I like picnics so I wanted to give the shot an outdoors-but-still-classy vibe. The single light source helped achieve that, seeing as how picnics usually only have one key light, the sun.
unedited
Above is the untreated jpeg, well, mostly untreated. I tweaked a few things while converting it from a raw file. Looks good, some blurring from my wide aperture, nice focus, but I really want those fruits to pop.
edited
As you can see, I dodged the fruits to make them more prevalent, while burning the background a bit. I also burned some of the glare off of the orange peel. The blur in the background was good untreated, but I added some blur just to make sure you couldn’t see the food stains on my bandana from where I wiped my mouth off on it.
Food photography is great. Why not take pictures of food? While this exercise did afford me the luxury of a photo studio, many of the concepts can easily be applied at home or even in a restaurant. Make sure you reflect all the light back onto the food you can, and pick a backdrop that makes the food pop. And hey, when in doubt, just Photoshop out the stains.
Thanks for the eye, and thanks to Rob for taking some photos of me.
apg images 