Studio Workshops - Still Life/Food Photography

For this workshop we were split into groups of 3-4, and given a food theme to photograph. In my group were Emily and Matt.  We were given the Italian theme.  We had to choose from a range of foods, which included pasta shells and spaghetti, olive oil, tomatoes, and some Italian looking tea towels.  There was also some ciabatta that we could choose to use if we wanted. 

Emma made available to us also a spray containing water and glycerin that could be used to give a shine to food.  This would give the illusion of freshness.

We chose to use the Octobox to light our food.  We were using the Octobox without flash.  We placed the Octobox at an approximate 45 degree angle to the food, and slightly to the back of the food.  The food was placed on a cappuccino coloured background.  For this shoot we needed to use a tripod as we were going to be using longer exposures.  We would also be using the self-timers on our cameras so as to eliminate camera shake.

We didn’t use light meters for this shoot.

I used my Nikon D7000 camera and my kit lens (18-105mm). 

As I was using this lens the F-stop would vary depending on where I focused.

Regarding my White Balance, Emma helped me to adjust the White Balance using kelvin (after a few practice shots Emma adjusted the kelvin to 4170).

We took it in turns to arrange the food and adjust the lighting.  The lighting on this workshop did prove to be quite problematic.  We adjusted the power both up and down.  We also had to contend with reflection from the glass pasta jar.

When arranging the food, we didn’t cut the tomatoes, as we didn’t want to damage the tea towels with tomato juice.  We did use the glycerine spray though to add shine to the tomatoes.

It took quite a bit of patience in order to get what is hoped to be a good food shot.  When taking the shot I decided to shoot straight on, but slightly higher than the food.  This I believed would produce the best composition.

I did find it a quite difficult shoot, but it was also enjoyable.  

I think that we tend to feel that shooting inanimate objects should be quite easy, after all we aren't dealing with a model who has to create poses.  I found the opposite.  You have to position the objects so that the composition is going to give a message, or story.  It's no good just placing objects on a table, they need to be able to interact with each other and give a whole picture.  

The theme we were given was Italian, and the use of tomatoes, pasta, the tricolour tea towels are all used to develop that theme.

The reflection from the October has been removed from the olive oil bottle on the right.  

 

This image has the olive oil bottle.

In this image I have removed the olive oil bottle using Photoshop.  I much prefer this image to the original.