Register · Search · Software · Join Upload & Sell · Hosting

	Moderated by: Fred Miranda
	Username   Password FM Forum Rules FM Forums | Lighting & Studio Techniques | Join Upload & Sell    Search Used end    Archive 2009 · A simple food/product setup?

Daniel Heineck Offline Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #1 · A simple food/product setup? I own 2 540ez's and would like to put together a very basic kit to shoot my meals for a personal/family food blog. For this shot, I merely bounced it off the ceiling, but would like to obviously add some control and snap/depth to the shot. I pored through profoto's modifier lookup here and really love the look of the magnum and gridded silver softlight reflector. Obviously given the size of my source, these are an impossibility. I was hoping some of you guys could help a lighting noob with a 1, maybe 2 light recommended setup for clean simple product/food shots. I'm thinking either the smallest silver PLM, or a small softbox. Second light I'll use snooted, if at all. Thanks! Daniel Nov 03, 2009 at 04:52 AM

cwebster Offline Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #2 · A simple food/product setup? Simplest setup for food is one light, unmodified from above and behind the food angled to put nice specular highlights to make the food look "juicy" and a matte reflector down in front to provide bright, diffuse fill. You need lots more light than you have here to get decent depth of field, and don't use a wide angle lens, the distortion will make the food look strange. Search this forum for "food" and you'll find a fairly recent thread with some nice examples. Don't forget that much of the success of food photography is about the look of the food itself, which is the domain/realm of the food stylist. No pro food shoot is without one. <Chas> Nov 03, 2009 at 04:57 AM

jontiffin Offline Upload & Sell: On p.1 #3 · A simple food/product setup? A magnum is a powerful reflector, effectively doubling the output of a zoom reflector. A n easy set up would be a shoot thru umbrella and a bounce card. It sounds ridiculously minimal but it will allow for manipulation to taste, no pun intended. Nov 03, 2009 at 05:32 AM

c.d.embrey Offline Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #4 · A simple food/product setup? I lit a lot of food commercials back in the 1970s, Armour hams and turkeys, Kraft salad dressing, Knudsen dairy products, fast food like Taco Time, Wendy's, more food than I can remember 8-) Also a lot of wine and beer. Most food likes top or top back either straight or angled. Different foods take different light. Salads like top light and loafs of bread like a top back at about a 45 degree angle. Take something like a goose neck reading light and move it around the food until you find a light you like. Then put your flash there. Something simple that looks good is an open ended box made of show card or maybe foam core. Show card or poster board and small pieces of foam core can be found at an art supply store. While at the art supply store pick up some Clear Print 1000H tracing paper. 1000H comes in rolls up to six feet wide, but all you need is a medium size sheet, maybe a 20x24 or 24x30. To build this box tape four pieces of show card together (black side out, white side in) and on the top opening tape in the tracing paper several inches below the rim (this is to stop spill). Hold the box at the position you determined and shoot flash through the tracing paper. These boxes can be retangular or cone shaped, square across the end or cut at an angle -- what ever fits your food lay out. Or maybe try this without the tracing paper -- this would give you a strong specular light with the white walls of the box providing fill. cwebster is right about the food stylist. They can make or break a food shoot. Nov 03, 2009 at 06:48 AM

BrianO Offline Dedicated FM Upload & Sell: On p.1 #5 · A simple food/product setup? In addition to the lighting advice you're getting, plus one for the comments about food stylists. Since you're doing your photography for yourself, you'll want to be your own stylist, and that means examining all the food shots you can from magazines like Food & Wine, Gourmet, Cook's Illustrated, etc. Figure out what it is about a shot that grabs your attention, and then try to duplicate it. For example, in the shot you posted above there's shallow depth of field but no clear subject. Total depth of field across the plate would work better, or placing a distinct subject (like a nicely browned chicken filet or a big slice of eggplant or whatever) in the focused area of a shallow DOF photo. Several years ago I took a weeklong cooking course at the Disney Institute (no longer in existance), and one of the classes was on Coverpage Cooking, where we learned how to prepare foods for photography. While everything we prepared was made of edible products, they weren't always prepared edibly. For instance, the beautiful Thanksgiving turkey you see on the cover of many magazines this time of year may be raw, painted with soy sauce, and the cut area "cooked" with a torch or hot air gun. Yum! Nov 03, 2009 at 07:03 AM

BrianO Offline Dedicated FM Upload & Sell: On p.1 #6 · A simple food/product setup? Almost forgot; if you're not already using one, definitely use a tripod for still life photography like this. Nov 03, 2009 at 07:13 AM

Daniel Heineck Offline Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #7 · A simple food/product setup? Thanks folks for your information. Simply fantastic information. CD--I'll be off to the craft store soon to make up a box as you suggest. And hopefully have some foamcore left over for flagging, extra reflectors, etc. I'll certainly be my own stylist--which is certainly an art unto itself. Plating is something else I want to learn for both photography and food presentation ends. Certainly won't be doing anything like they do for real shoots--I want to eat my product not too much after the shoot while it's still warm. The whole process is just fun for me, so I'm not terribly worried about perfection as much as constantly improving. That said aspiring for professional results is always good. For the record, my DOF is shallow because I ran out of power. Since these are all going to be prepped for the web, I could probably get away with iso 800, maybe even 1600 and stop the lens down a ton. I'm appreciating why product/food is shot with TS lenses to get the plane of focus where you want it. But again, thank you folks. I'll try and update this thread along the way as my free time permits. Best, Daniel Nov 03, 2009 at 07:15 AM

cgardner Offline Dedicated FM Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #8 · A simple food/product setup? The strongest illusion of 3D is created when objects are backlit and the camera shoots into the shadow side. The amount of detail seen on the shadow side is the controlled with fill (to bring the darkest shadows up to the range the camera can record detail) and key light (to create the illusion of shape and texture on the front of the object. Here's the basic recipe: A foundation of fill to lift all the shadows the camera sees. Ideally fill should come from over the camera and be as shadowless as possible because where there are shadows there will be dark unfilled voids in the photo: Separation is needed between the foreground and background. Here I added a light with a grid to control the look at will. The separation can also be controlled by simply starting with a lighter background. Modeling on the front of the objects is created by an off axis "key" light. Note that the shadows the key light casts are already filled with detail by the fill light. What happens, regardless of whether fill is added first or last is that the key light overlaps the even fill. That is how the contrast of the lighting pattern is controlled. Finally the illusion of 3D is enhanced by creating bright specular highlights on the raised surfaces from behind. The brain equates the pattern of contrast with shape based on memory of seeing known shapes in similar light. Highlighted areas are assumed to be higher, shaded areas lower. Like the way onions, carrots and celery create a basic foundation in a sauce, the fill, frontal key, and back rim accent lighting work together in a fundamental way to create the illusion of 3D in a 2D photograph. The forth light for controlling the background is really only needed if both the background and the foreground objects are very dark. The basic goal is to contrast the most important foreground object(s) with the overall tone of the background. That contrast is what will pull the viewer's eye towards it. So if your center of interest is a Dover Sole it will be the star on a dark toned plate and table cloth but lost on a white one. But if the featured dish is Devils Food Cake the background needs to be lighter so it contrasts, but not so much the contrast of all the white surrounding it overpowers the eye of the viewer. What I'm saying here is that "lighting" in the holistic sense is how you the photographer combine the light and what reflects it to feature what is most important in a way that contrasts and balances it with the overall tone of the background and everything else in the photo at the same time. So plan your photos in advance around the color and tone of whatever you want to feature and give thought to how all the other stuff in the shot will either push the eye towards that centerpiece with contrasting tone and color, or pull it away due to contrasting distractions. For highly reflective objects like silver or glass a different lighting strategy is used. On reflective objects what we see are the reflections of everything around the object. So we surround the object with white to create uniform highlights, aiming the frontal light on the surround instead of directly at the object. Then to create the "shadows" we insert black cards or other dark objects to block the white reflections in places where we'd expect a non-reflective object lit as in the exercise above would have shadows to create the brain-tricking illusion of high/low 3D shape. Chuck Nov 03, 2009 at 12:00 PM

	FM Forums | Lighting & Studio Techniques | Join Upload & Sell end

You are not logged in. Login or Register

Username   Password   Lost your password?