Jan 02

Dessert with latte

By derek Food No Comments »

Sorry for the long hiatus – can’t believe December completely slipped away. We did some shooting for a new client in December – Nokia – which kept us busy. Looking forward to shooting more projects for them this year.

As we wrap up the holidays, I thought I’d try and squeeze in one more fancy meal – a delicious egg dessert with fruit and a latté – delicious.

olivea 043As with most of my shots involving food, this was shot using natural light – a long stretch of windows along the left side of the setup. The biggest problem when shooting something like this is to control the highlights on the shiny edge of the egg dessert facing the windows. Here is how the dessert looked before editing.

olivea 043 copySee how shiny and bright the left side of the egg is looking – not good. It’s gone specular – meaning it’s basically white with no details. There are a number of ways to solve this problem, but the simplest is to take another shot, but under-expose it enough to retain detail on the left side of the egg, like this.

olivea 043 copy 2Of course, this shot is too dark to use – the food looks dull and tired. We load the original shot above and this shot into Photoshop, and use the under-exposed shot to “paint in” the shiny parts of the egg with this under-exposed shot. We just paint over the shiny areas until we get a well-exposed egg, removing the blown out white areas.

The result – the first shot above. Scroll up and you’ll see how well this works to control over-exposures on shiny surfaces.

Tagged with: • • • • • • • •
Nov 21

Champagne flutes with apples

By derek Still Life 5 Comments »

With the American holiday weekend fast approaching, it’s time to celebrate with a glass (or three) of champagne!

tgc 0323 Champagne flutes with apples

This is one of the few types of shots I do using entirely strobe lighting. To get the right lighting on the glasses and of a short enough duration to freeze the bubbles, the shot demands strobes. Whereas my typical natural light shots are 3 seconds or more in duration, this one was shot at 1/10th of a second, using an aperture of f/10.

One of the most deceptive things about this shot is the lights on the strings and the apparent size of the individual bulbs. The initial thinking is to use a longer exposure to make the bulbs larger, but in fact, it is determined by the aperture setting of the camera. Since I used a very long lens for this shot (210mm on medium format) and was relatively close to the set, I wasn’t worried about changing the aperture and the effect that would have on the depth of field in the shot – it was going to be shallow regardless.

Here is a diagram showing my lighting setup:

LightingSetupThe key is to use a large light source – in this case, a very large white diffusion panel. That provides the nice lighting on the flutes – a small light source would not provide the beautiful strip of light down each side of the glasses.

It’s also important to keep the light off the string of lights – if you light them, you’ll light the string between the lights, and that’s not desirable. Seeing a bit of the string is fine, but lighting the string would look odd.

Finally, the backdrop is lit separately to show the colour of the red wreaths.

The rest is just placement of the props on the set to give a nice overall balance. The most demanding part – surprisingly, it was the metal wine bucket with the knobby handles. Getting it just right took some work.

The final image is a composite of two shots – the one exposed as seen above, and a second under-exposed, to deal with the bright speculars in the flutes that resulted from the lighting setup. The under-exposed shot is composited into this shot to “paint over” the specular areas of the glasses, bringing them back from white.

Hope you enjoyed the post – have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • •
preload preload preload