We also worked on our white wine lighting setups – always more complex cause the liquid allows you to see through to the background, which is never flattering. White wine always needs a bit of pop to make it look good too!
For our testing, we used a Riesling, which always tends to look like Sprite when shot if you’re not careful.
Wow, where has the month of August gone? Been shooting pretty constantly all month, and realized it’s been a while since my last blog entry.
On Monday of this week, I was shooting still life for Bay – she owns a company called Honey Pie Hives & Herbals out of Prince Edward County. Our day called for 6 shots – 2 more than typical, so we really had to motor through the shots.
Ruth Gangbar worked as the stylist on the shoot, with Laura Branson once again providing props, but wasn’t present for the actual shoot. I am so lucky to work with incredibly talented people.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot showing Ruth styling the honey for one of the shots – taken with my handy iPhone.
Behind-the-scenes on a still life shoot
As you can see, I was using all natural light for the shot – my preference. My strobes are great, and I really like using them, but prefer to use natural light when doing shoots like this. I was bouncing a hair of light back into the front of the shot (you can see my Hassey camera right beside Ruth’s face). I used a HUGE white sheet supported by two AutoPoles for the fill. Too close makes it too bright, and it starts to look artificial.
I was once again using the HTS on the camera – it’s a tilt-shift lens that lets me better control perspective on the set – you can see the camera looks pretty high relative to the honey, but I had a fairly aggressive down-shift on the lens, with a bit of tilt to control the depth of field. Lovin’ my new HTS – it’s an incredible tool, and the integration with Phocus (that’s the Hasselblad software that runs my camera) does an amazing job correcting the image (removing vignetting – edge of the lens starts to darken when you shift and tilt a lens).
The grip in the shot is holding the honey stir stick in just the right spot – they tend to rise up to the surface if not held in place. And hand-holding won’t work – exposures for this type of natural light shots are typically up around 3 seconds. So nothing can move.
We worked on the composition for about an hour and a half, and ended up with this shot.
Honey
Little details like the honey dripping and pooling makes the shot.
Till next post…
There is something about shooting bread that I find really appealing – the texture, the gorgeous colours, the randomness of its shape – just makes for a very interesting subject to shoot.
Today, I spent the day shooting breads. Simple propping, so the bread could do all the talking in the photos, and just added parchment paper with the odd knife and glass. Very graphic images resulted – here’s one from the shoot.
Baguette
The side lighting used in this shot helped to bring out the texture in the crust, and gave a nice shading to the right side of the baguette in the photo. The blue glass gave the shot closure. The glass is from Crate & Barrel, a new favorite spot for sourcing props.
We are continuing to enjoy our latest lens – well, more of a lens adapter than a true lens – the HTS 1.5 from Hasselblad. It provides all the shifting and tilting you could want in food photography. Allows the camera to stay above the subject, but lowered down so you can see more of the food while keeping a straight composition. Think of it this way – for the shot shown, if the camera is tilted, the blue glass in the background would be leaning out of the photograph. In this shot, we were able to keep the camera pretty level, but used the HTS to lower the lens so we’d see more of the bread as the focal point of the composition. Glass stays straight, and with the tilting on the lens, we have even more control over the point of focus. It’s a fantastic tool.
I love summer – there are so many beautiful fruits available to shoot for clients. Yesterday, we shot a number of local organic fruits and were absolutely amazed at the colours. Our favorite shot was the yellow plums, shown here. We love the rustic feel of them shot on the old weathered barn door.
Enjoy the holiday weekend!
Yellow plums
Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of shooting for PUR(e). We shot four prepared foods – beet salad, rabbit, dessert, and vegetables. Thank you Tony for hiring us to shoot your creative for you. Your creative direction was perfect and helped us get the most out of the shots.
Here’s a quick look at one of the shots – the rabbit.
Rabbit
We also put together a behind-the-scenes video of us shooting the beet salad. Enjoy!
Spring tomatoes
Here’s my latest promo – if you’re not on my distribution list, drop me a message through my contact form and I’ll add you on future mailings. They go out as e-mail messages and postcards via snail-mail, so be sure to leave me complete contact info.
Now I’m going to eat those tomatoes with cheese – yum.
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