These are really nicely done. We've been shooting some chocolates for a CA pastry shop that makes chocolates and for a restaurant in LA. It's one of the few product-shoot clients I still have. The fringe benefits keep me interested.
Assuming these will get worked in post. Is that correct?
- Something about the jagged/real looking edges I find distracting. Particularly since these are glamour/product shots, not photo-journalism.
- I particularly like how the face of the chocolate is lit in the first shot, with high contrast and solid color tone. But the others feel a bit loose and soft with the lighting... giving a bit of a mealy/chalky impression rather than a smooth, creamy, deep impression.
-The green edge-glow from the lighting on number 3 distracts.
-The shadow of the bean on the chocolate doesn't work for me in number 5.
-Number 4 looks like it's sitting in white sand in front, not milk.
-In the hot spots and shadows there seem to be superfluous/distracting casts (or sensation of casts), for instance a greenish tint in image 5, yellow in image 3, and green in image 2. (BTW, calibrated IPS display here.)
-From an overall aesthetic perspective these seem a bit heavy on the supporting characters and light on the subject. There's a reason why we see chocolate ads/covers on higher-end chocolates where it's all chocolate, for instance, and then a single sprig of mint (vs the lava-lamp green glow in your mint image). Or a single, small, slice of orange, or a little pile of chocolate powder.
I hope you don't take any offense. Unlike congratulatory posts that won't help you actually get better as a photographer, spending time on where you could improve elevates the game. It's good for us (criticizing is a means of improving our own work), and it's good for you. And if more than one person gave you proper C&C, you'd be able to filter out those (perhaps mine) that seem like outliers.
Almost all of this can be addressed in post. And I'm neither the customer nor the AD-- so grain of salt and all that. But that's my 2 cents. Good work overall. A few tweaks would, I think, elevate this.
On last thing: This is where a tilt lens would be of serious value. I find the selective focus here a bit arbitrary. Like you had no choice but to blue part of the chocolate-- but just sort of arbitrarily had focus fall-off on the chocolate. I think image 1 shines here because the whole chocolate is in focus. It looks good that way.
Also, if the full chocolate was in focus in other shots you'd go a long way towards correcting the tints/perhaps optical aberrations in the hot spots and shadows of the chocolate images where the image is transitioning from focus to out of focus.
While these are probably better than I could do, they look far from what you would see in an advertisement. I agree 100% with justruss's C&C and will add:
(1) The break into a chocolate square would be *on* the crease, not including a partial bit of chocolate from the adjacent square.
(2) The glimmers of light in the upper part of the square look like oversights. Also tough to tell what the square is sitting in due to lack of DOF.
(3) Waaay too much green and sloppy looking with green on the edge of the chocolate square.
(4) If the milk pouring in the b/g were in focus and the splash not blown out, this would be *very* nice.
(5) Best of the bunch IMO, but the sloppy edges of the chocolate kind of ruin this.
