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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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. :)

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