Food photography for Kings

Food Photography again… Actually the pancake shot was lit like I normally light pizza. It was sort of an interesting discovery on my part. Basically, I lit the shadow side with mirrors and three different areas, alternating: light, dark, light, dark. It’s subtle, but affective.



The pulled pork sandwich shot worked out really well, I thought. What I like most is the texture across the sides of the bread, especially the shadow side.



I was a little disappointed with this chicken shot. Actually, it’s the cauliflower I think looks a little texture-less. But it was…. Ya just can’t put texture where it isn’t… I know, I’ve tired. The client wouldn’t let us switch it out with fresh, but I understand his concern. There is such thing as “truth in advertising”. You do the best you can with what you have…



I like this chicken shot. The only thing that bugs me is the fact that I think we lifted the rear end of the breast a bit too far. It looks a little unnatural to me.



I like this fish shot too. Nice texture in the rice and nice shape on the veggies.



All in all, not a bad day’s shoot. What do you guys think?

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