Pizza Photography

Shooting pizzas again. Sorry, but I''ve had a lot on my plate lately :+) and haven't been able to post as many things as I would have liked to. Here are three examples of outlined pizza photography. I'm pretty happy with the results. I've refined my technique a little this time around. I try to improve things a little on every shoot. (a lot, if I can) I've added a couple more mirrors, probably totaling 8 or 9. To create as much depth as possible, it's important not to "over-fill" and to let the darks go dark, but not too dark.... It's an accuired taste and technique. What I'm getting at is... you can light too much and it''s the darks that make the difference. Light, dark, light, dark... all the time scrapping the light as I go. That's how I light the crust. The backgournd should give you some clues about how this is lit.

Most of you guys have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, do you? Claudia does.... :+)

Portraits with a sb 800

I finally finished the portrait project I've been working on. I took this "budget" job so that I could try out some techniques I wanted to work on. The budget was so low that I couldn't afford an assistant and therefore I needed to get the equipment level WAY down. So far down, that I could get everything except the light stands, into one pelican case. Since I'm historically a studio photographer that went on location shoots with most of his studio, I wanted to learn how the "other half" lived. That meant that I had to come up with a lighting kit made out of "on-camera" flashes. I first started out with three heads and then cut it down to three, and usually ended up using just one. I found that the key to working like this is to look for locations that worked for the composition AND the lighting. I learned quite a bit...



This was shot with a SB 800 on an umbrella (shot with 80-200 f2.8 on my Nikon D3)



Shhot with an SB 8000 on a large umbrella (shot with 80-200 f2.8)



Shot with an SB 800 with a large umbrella

I found that one of the hardest things to do was to keep the umbrella, head and stand from blowing over in the wind. It's hard to justify taking sand bags when you're attempting to fly as light as possible.... (shot with 28-70 f2.8)



This was shot available light only. Not too often it works out this way, but the light in this room was really nice. (28-70 mm 2.8 zoom)



This was shot with the SB 800 insde a medium box using my 85 1.4 lens

Mitchell's Fish Market shootf

Here are the results from a recent food shoot. I was happy with the results. We tried to keep the backgrounds simple.

Heinz Soups

Okay... I've been gone for a while. No excuses, I just didn't have anything exciting to share. I did a job for Del Monte where I basically poured out the contents of their cans in a bowl and then did the same with their competitor's cans of food. That way they could compare what the consumer saw and not what the food stylist could create. I guess it was valuable to the company, but it was pretty boring to shoot. And then I had a bunch of environmental portraits, which wasn't too bad. I did get a few good shots out of that, but I never got around to posting them. Maybe later...

The shoot today was for Heinz soups. The tough part about this job was trying to match the lighting of some other photographer. That's a hard thing to do, but at the the same time, something that's very educational. There's a guy here in Pittsburgh that's a really good shooter, but his technique is very different than mine. Today, I learned a lot about how he does what he does. I had to imitate it. You'd be surprised at how much you can learn when you have to imitate another photographer's style. The good thing is that you can take what you want from what you've learned and then ignore the rest. Back when I was teaching at the Art Institute, I would suggest that my students copy, as exactly as they could, a photo they liked. Some people thought that this was a little unorthodox, but I thought (and still think) that it's a great way to learn. Sure, you can't continue to copy all your life, but it's a great way to figure out different techniques.

Gotta go. Tomorrow, Mitchell's Fish market! I love the "shootie bootie" from those shoots!

:+)