I’ve been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to learn product photography and more specifically food photography. Even the subject of food photography is pretty broad. To be honest the majority of it bores me because there are just too many cooks in the kitchen. Clients, art directors, and designers all get in the way of the photographers vision. Editorial food photography is what I’ve been working on. It seems to be the only type of food photography that allows you, the photographer, to photograph what you want, the way that you want to do it. When I think of editorial food photography I think of Food and Wine magazine. I like the articles in Food and Wine, but I love the pictures and that’s what I’ve been working on recreating in my kitchen. I scoured the net trying to find great articles that could teach me how to properly light my subject but to no avail.
The closest thing I found, and perhaps the most interesting article was a blog post found at foodportfolio.com. The photographer, Michael Ray, has some gorgeous pictures of food and has been hired by many large companies for his abilities. In the blog post, which I found to be a bit of a tease, he explains the business of food photography and spends a lot of time talking about the importance of light. Unfortunately he views this as intellectual property and doesn’t really explain to you how he set up the light, but he does stress the importance of it. He also stresses the importance of the use of small light which he achieves using mirrors. This is the point in the article that got my attention. I like many of you operate on a limited budget. The amount of money I’ve invested in equipment outweighs the current return on my investment, but I hope that will change in the not too distant future. I’ve taken a hiatus from dumping money into lenses and I’ve been reinvesting my earnings into lighting.
I also have recently chosen to align my brand preference with some photographer friends of mine so that we could share equipment and help ease the financial burden which by the way is something I highly recommend. Wherever your brand loyalties lie, find some photographers with similar taste in equipment and network with them, but I’ll save that for another article.
I re-read Michael Ray’s post a few times thinking that perhaps I had missed the point where he explains how he lit a specific picture. He alludes to a lot of concepts and ideas, but really forces you to guess how he did it. He forced me to look at pictures differently, which I found extremely frustrating, but I believe was his point. I now spend a considerable amount time evaluating the lighting techniques of what I believe to be both good and bad pictures, trying to find commonalities between the two. I’ve gone so far as to take a sharpie to a magazine and put x-marks and arrows where I believe the light to be coming from. What I’ve realized is that it’s very difficult to find a great food photography picture with only one light source. That being said I’ve begun to experiment with the various possibilities. My initial findings were troublesome at best, and as usual the answer appears to be spend more money or work with daylight. Since spending more money doesn’t fit today’s budget and ultimately would only complicate my explanation, today I’m going to work with daylight. It’s a common element I believe we all have access to in some shape or form. I’ve also employed the addition of two mirrors to my team. Nothing fancy, just what I happened to have around the house.
Today’s subject is an orange halved and placed on a plate. It’s not going to win any awards for originality, but it expresses my point, actually Michael Ray’s point, very well. In photo one you can see the subject. It’s kind of dull. There isn’t much depth to it. There isn’t much in the way of texture. The top of the faced piece is slightly over exposed.
In picture two I’ve introduced the first mirror. Do you notice the highlight that it puts on the downward facing orange? How about the highlight on the backside of the front-faced orange? Those highlight reveal a great deal of texture that was omitted from the original picture. It also adds a new light source to the plate, which makes the front of the image a little bit more interesting.
Now in picture three I’ve added a second mirror. The second mirror brightens up the under portion of the right side of the plate. It adds a second layer of lighting to the rear orange which accents the first mirrors highlight nicely and evens out the lighting of the entire image considerably. It also adds a pleasing definition to the shadows cast on the plate. The addition of light increases the contrast of the shadow on the plate and the end result is a little bit more dramatic. Now these additions are subtle, but in my opinion very important to the overall picture.
So is this picture ready for print? Of coarse not, but did we radically improve the lighting of this scene using less than $5.00 worth of mirrors. I like to think so. Now just think of what we could have accomplished with 4 or 5 or even 12 mirrors? Now I’m sure there’s a point of diminishing returns and like everything in photography, you don’t want to over do it, but I think this certainly adds a new tool to the camera bag. I’ve begun to experiment with these techniques using my flashes and have been left with mixed results. The beauty of working with natural light is that you can see the effect it’s going to have on the image before the picture is taken. My speed lights are still a bit of a mystery to me. A guessing game if you will. On my short list of things to purchase is a light meter, as I believe this will drastically improve the success rate of my shots and cut down on my tinkering time. Until that day comes we’ve just got to work with what we’ve got.
