Final image (on right): Canon 5DMkII, Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS lens, 1/8 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I recently photographed a blender filled with fruit for my stock portfolio, and the setup was unique to my usual food photographs so I thought I’d share it here on my blog. I almost always use diffused daylight for my food images (with a few exceptions) so I wanted to go with that and, even though this was a setup that would have worked just as well with strobes, I thought I’d give it a try with window-light to see what I could come up with.

When you photograph glass, or any reflective surface, you need to watch out for stray reflections. If you’re in a room with colored walls and the walls are showing in your surface then you’ll see that color in your image, just as I did with the gold-colored stripe at the bottom of the image, which is a combination reflection of the wooden surface and gold reflector I used for fill. You also want to try to add light to the sides of the glass to outline it so it doesn’t “disappear” into the background, especially if you don’t have anything inside of the glass when you photograph it.

I also wanted a backdrop that was simple, and neutral, so I added a piece of white foam board at an angle directly behind the blender. My focal length was long (180mm) so that at ƒ/8 the DOF was shallow enough so that any imperfection in the board blurred away, and it add a nice gradient to the background as well (I didn’t add any vignette to the final image since it would have introduced banding in the corners).

Here are all of the elements to my setup:

• Camera: Canon 5DMkII
• Lens: Canon 70-200mm ƒ/4L IS
• Tripod and head with Custom Bracket
• Lighting: Back-lit with diffused window light (North-facing)
• Four pieces white foam board
• Small gold reflector for fill light in the front

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/250 sec (left) and 1/350 (right) at f/2.8, ISO 200

Last night I had dinner with some friends at their house and brought over some salmon and cedar planks I’d been wanting to use. I don’t grill too often (mostly because I don’t own a grill) and really wanted to both eat food cooked on cedar and photograph it, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I brought all the fixins (minus the home-made Teriyaki sauce that Renee cooked up) and they helped out with the grill. I brought my Canon 7D w/ 50 f/1.4 along to get a few photos … I wasn’t expecting to get too much but I really like the images I made. Plus, they’re photographers, too, so they totally understood my need to photograph the food. :)

To make the salmon I soaked the cedar planks in water for about 20-30 mins and then marinated the salmon for about 20 mins in homemade Teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, garlic and ginger cooked for a bit … not sure exactly how she cooked it but it was good!). The grill was pre-heated to about 350-400° F, then we added the cedar planks and let them heat up for a few minutes. When they were ready we flipped the planks over, placed salmon on them (along with some asparagus seasoned w/ olive oil and salt/pepper) and I layered orange slices over the top of the salmon. It all cooked for approximately 20 minutes, then we took it off the grill and ate it up. It was really, really good … the smokiness flavor from the cedar really came through, especially in the asparagus … and I smelled like a campfire the rest of the evening (which is awesome!).

Here is a behind-the-scenes pic of me, along with a photo of the smoking asparagus:

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/100 sec at f/2.8, ISO 200

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/250 sec at f/7.1, ISO 100

I was up pretty late last night working on the last bits of my new book, and this is one of the images I created. The setup and Photoshop editing is similar to the “steaming shrimp” photo from this blog post (steam added with a hand-steamer & two images merged together using masking), so take a look at that post for more info on how I created this image.

Here’s a BTS image and list of equipment so you can see my setup:

• Canon Speedlite 430EX
• Lastolite TriGrip Diffuser
• Black foam board for background
• White foam board underneath and also to the left for fill light
• Small reflector for fill light
• Manfrotto Magic Arm to hold fork (w/ Gaffer tape)

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/30 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

I had some bananas that had been sitting on my counter for a few days and were über ripe, so I decided to make banana bread. I also had some fresh cherries just sitting around, so I decided to throw them into the banana bread to see what happened. :) It turned out very nicely, and very yummy! I don’t do a lot of baking, and don’t eat a lot of sweet stuff so it was fun to do something different for a change. The recipe is at the bottom of the post … it’s from an old family cook-book my grandma gave me several years ago (I noted the changes I made in the ingredients).

To photograph it, I didn’t have any cherries leftover to add to the scene, so instead I used a very cute tea-cup that I’d been wanting to photograph for quite some time to add color to the background. I also placed a pat of margarine on the bread and steamed it with a hand-steamer to melt it (see this post for more info on that technique) … it also added a subtle touch of steaminess to the top-right part of the scene, too. I used window-light with two folded white foam-boards to fill in the light on the food, and a black foam-board in the back to soften the light and prevent overexposed areas, and also to lessen any reflection that would appear on the liquid in the tea-cup.

Banana Bread:

1 cup sugar (I used brown sugar)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups flour
1/2 cup shortening (I used melted butter)
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 ripe bananas, mashed (I used three)
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used hazelnuts and also added whole, fresh pitted cherries)

Sift sugar, salt, baking soda & flour together. Stir in shortening, yolks and milk. Stir in bananas. Fold in egg whites and nuts. Put in greased and floured 9x5x3-inch loaf pan. (I also sprinkled some sliced almonds on the top before baking.) Bake at 350° F for 60-070 minutes until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool on rack.

One thing that I do frequently with my photographs is I use a combination of a wide aperture and a long focal length to decrease the depth of field (DOF) in my images to add more compression to the background, making it soft and out of focus. When photographing this cake pop I thought I would create some photos that show how different aperture settings can affect the background of an image.

The photos above show the final photograph along with a behind-the-scenes image. (For the final image I actually merged two files together … one at ƒ/4 to get a soft background, and another at ƒ/11 to get sharper focusing on the cake, since I wasn’t happy with the focus quality on the cake at ƒ/4). For this setup I used window light, bounced onto the subject with white foam board. For the background I used Christmas-tree lights in front of a soft yellow-ish cloth-covered piece of foam board to add more gold tones to the background, and bounced some light on it to make it a little brighter (that’s the foam board you see attached to the boom stand). The cake pop was about three feet from the background lights, and the camera was on a tripod (that funny-shaped black thing in the image on the right) approximately four feet from the cake pop. The DISTANCE you put between the subject and the background, and the FOCAL LENGTH you use (longer is better) are important if you want to achieve a very soft, out of focus background like I did here in this image.

The photos below show the same setup with different apertures, starting at ƒ/4 and going all the way to ƒ/32. All images were photographed at 200mm on a Canon 7D with no change to anything except the exposure settings. (To see it “in action” I created an animated GIF so you can watch the changes happen quickly.)

BTW, here’s a link to the recipe I used to make this cute little guy. :)

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/125 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Oftentimes the food we photograph loses its steam pretty quickly, even if it’s still hot. That little puff of steam adds so much to the photo … it plays with our senses and makes hot food look appetizing. There are some weird methods to add steam (microwaving cotton balls and other cotton products that should go nowhere near food) but I discovered another way that is actually pretty simple (thanks to a food stylist from a Kelby Training course I saw a while back). So, heres’s an easy way to add realistic steam to food photographs:

Behind-the-scenes photo …

Gear used:
• Canon 430EX speedlight as the main light shooting through a diffusion panel (the inside of a five-in-one reflector).
• Black foam core in front of the light to serve as the background
• Fork taped to a set of wooden chopsticks that are taped to a Manfrotto Magic Arm
• White foam core to the left for front fill-light
• Reflector/white foam core underneath shrimp on fork to add white color bounce
• Camera set on a tripod with cable-release to trip the shutter

To add steam to the shrimp, I used a hand steamer (this one was only $15 at Bed Bath & Beyond).

Photograph the shrimp with steam using the hand steamer (it took a lot of trial-and-error to get the “perfect” steamy look).

Photograph the shrimp with no steam.

The last step is to put both images in the same document in Photoshop and mask them so you have steamy shrimp in one half of the image and the nicer looking fork (plus no hand-steamer) in the other half of the image. (Here’s a tutorial on masking if you need help.) For some other photos I’ve done similar to this I’ll also photograph the “no steam” image with a little more reflector fill in the front to brighten up the metal on the fork (my “reflector” was a white paper towel most of the time). Some of the frames I got were okay and didn’t have the steamer in the photo, but there may have been residual steam below the shrimp, or my hand in front of it “muddied up” the color of the metal in the fork, so masking the two images together makes for a much cleaner photograph.

Top images: Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, f/5.6 at 1/13 sec, ISO 100

When I photograph food the one thing I don’t want to do is blow-out/over-expose/clip any large areas of the frame. When you overexpose the highlights in a photograph you are pushing those pixels so that they are 100% pure white (255, 255, 255 on the RGB color scale). Even if you are photographing something that is actually white, you still don’t want to overexpose the whites because you will lose precious shadow detail in those areas. (One exception to this would be if you are isolating your subject on a white background in a studio environment.)

The top two photos in the above image were both photographed with the exact same settings, one with an over-exposed background, and one with a well-balanced exposure. The basic lighting setup, as you can see in the behind-the-scenes image, was window-light with the use of reflectors in the front of the food for fill-light (here’s a pulled-back image of my living room so you can see the size of the entire window).

Red Areas: The red you see in the images are the areas that are overexposed. For the first photo I had a good exposure on the food in the foreground but the background was way washed out. In the second “fixed” photo there is very little red, with the exception of a highlight along the rim of the bowl (which doesn’t really bother me). You can view the overexposed whites (and also the underexposed blacks) while editing your photos in pretty much any RAW editing software, and you can also enable a “highlight” alert on most SLRs that makes it really easy to spot the clipped highlights. (Check your camera manual for more information specific information on enabling the highlight alert on your brand/model of camera.)

Histogram: Notice the histogram towards the top of each of the photos. The tones on the first image are pushed all the way to the right, showing that the whites are “clipped”. In the second image the overall tones are mostly balanced, indicated by a full “mountain range” in the histogram.

The Fix: Since the too-bright-light was mostly coming in from the top-right table-top area of the photo, I dropped a piece of black foam core down behind it to cut out that “wash” of light hitting the table. The window is tall enough that the light still poured in from above the piece of black foam core, and I only lost a very small amount of light back-lighting the bowl of chips up front.

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/125 sec at ƒ/5.6, ISO 100

Yesterday I photographed this delicious green curry with chicken and jasmine rice dish, and decided to use a flash setup instead of the usual strobe/softbox or diffused sunlight setup I normally use. I mounted the flash on a light-stand, set it to manual mode, placed a shoot-through umbrella in front of it and triggered it with PocketWizard FlexTT5 radios. I filled in the front and sides with a reflector and foam-core.

Equipment:

• Canon 430EX Speedlight on lightstand
• Shoot-through umbrella
• 5-in-1 reflector (to the right of the dish)
• Foam-core “bookend” to the left of the dish

Here’s the behind-the-scenes setup from yesterday’s “Olive and Goat Cheese Bruschetta” photograph. I used the North-facing window in my condo (much easier to do food photography when next to a kitchen!), set the food on a hand-painted/distressed “table”, and used a large 5-in-one reflector (silver side) to add some fill. Pretty simple setup, really. :)

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: 70-200mm f/4L IS
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/8 second
ISO: 100

Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes of yesterday’s halibut photo. I quickly snapped this BTS image with my iPhone before I cleaned up the scene, and yesterday someone asked to see it. I used two-lights: an ABR-800 with Moon Unit for some pretty strong back-light, and then filled in the front of the dish with another Alien Bee light with a large soft-box.

For camera gear I used my Canon 7D with the Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens extended to 200mm for all shots to compress the background and make the main subject stand out.

The white table-top is a piece of wood I picked up from the hardware store, painted white and then painted with “crackle” paint to give it a distressed look. The final image here doesn’t show the table too well, but when it is visible in food images it adds a nice, subtle texture to the image that I really like.