"Food"

Food photography is a very useful skill to have and also very fun to shoot, especially when you get the eat the food afterwards. I don’t mean a quick snap of you dinner from a restaurant on Wednesday night, I'm talking studio, still life.

For this task I was quite happy from the start, food is not exactly a difficult concept to interpret. So it was down the shop for a bamboo chopping board, 3 oranges, Cinnamon Sticks, Star of Anis and a Plain Victoria Sponge.

To begin this shoot I took the bamboo chopping board outside, and gave it a spray tan, using a butane blowtorch. I then scraped the sides of the board on the concrete, scratched the surface with a knife, and to complete the 'battered' look I threw a brick at it.

I then set up my studio area, placing some white A3 paper over a chest of drawers against a white wall. I then arranged the objects on the chopping boarding, using a tripod and a remote shutter. I lit the shots with a single studio light set to model, bouncing it with a piece of paper.

I tried a variety of exposures, using shallow and large depth of field, changing the composition and angles. The great thing about this kind of photography is you can set up the still life, and shoot it from every angle and using all the settings you want, and then change the subject and do it all over again. It would be impossible to explain my shooting method as it varied from shot to shot, once I have the camera off of the tripod.

Upon completion of the shoot I loaded the shots into Photoshop  as usual. Adjusting the Levels, Contrast and Clarity to get the image as close to what I had in mind. The only problem was some of the background was appearing an off-white colour. Using the Dodge tool I worked on this area repetitively until the background was a nice flat white.

Here are some of the images.

Please add me on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100007321418710

Alternatively follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/AJTPhotographer