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Food Styling: Pasta December 3, 2009

Posted by Nicole : Behind-the-Scenes, Food Photography, Food Styling, Photography, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials , 7 comments

Pasta

When you are photographing food you need to make the image look so good you want to eat it. Having a plate of food in front of you is different … it can look sloppy and have no color, but our other senses kick in, such as smell and taste, so it looks appetizing at the time. However, with photography we lose most of those senses and can only rely on our sense of sight, so what the food looks like is extremely important.

This is where styling your food comes into play. The first photo only has pasta in the dish … well, that’s all you see, right? What you don’t see is that hidden below all those carefully placed mounds of linguine is a half-dome of styrofoam. The bulk of the styrofoam gives height to a bowl of pasta that would normally be flattened and caving in. After placing the styrofoam I took five strands of linguine and wrapped them around my fingers, then placed them down carefully so that none of the ends of the pasta strands were showing. I continued until the pasta was covering the styrofoam and looked balanced.

Next I took a pan of pearl onions and tomatoes that had been lightly sauteed and added each element to the dish separately. I used the live-view feature on my camera to help see the bowl of food as it will look when I take the photo – I found this feature to be very useful, btw. The last element I placed was the basil, and I tried to find the best looking leaves in the bunch.

I also added a few items that would typically be in a dining scene – the water glass and fork. The ice in the glass is actually fake – I got the ones in this scene from eBay, but you can find them all over the place (here’s a link to some simple acrylic ice cubes I found on Amazon.com). The ice and splashes you see on high-end commercial photographs are most likely custom-made acrylic – they are quite pricey but worth if if you have the budget. When you are adding these additional elements you want to remember to keep it simple and relevant to the scene, and if you want to add color then remember to either repeat your colors or keep them  complementary to your food dish.

Pasta Shoot: Behind-the-Scenes December 2, 2009

Posted by Nicole : Behind-the-Scenes, Food Photography, Photography, Tips & Tricks , 9 comments

Pasta BTS

Here’s a quick “behind-the-scenes” photo of a pasta shoot I did this afternoon. My main light was diffused window-light, with some fill light from a Nikon SB-800 speed-light to the left, softened with a shoot-thru umbrella. I also used a large silver reflector to bounce some of the light in to fill the background. I used a PocketWizards to fire the speedlight, but removed the one from my 7D to capture the BTS image.

SLC Minilypse Video May 4, 2009

Posted by Nicole : Behind-the-Scenes, Photography, Video, iStockphoto , 7 comments

This is a fun video I put together from footage and photos taken during the SLC Minilypse event in Salt Lake City, Utah last month (I also have an earlier blog post about it). It includes my own timelapse footage, and also several still images by some wonderful photographers that participated in the event. (To view more of the photographs from the event please go here.)

Click here to view the video on YouTube (also in HD).

Video is © Nicole S. Young (All Rights Reserved). Cannot be used or displayed without permission. Music licensed from iStockphoto: “Enjoy The Ride“, PumpArtist_39290/iStockphoto.com

Photography is a journey … February 8, 2009

Posted by Nicole : Behind-the-Scenes, Photography, iStockphoto , add a comment

I have always considered myself a “self-taught” photographer (well, minus those few B&W darkroom classes I took in high-school). ;)  It’s been a long journey for me, and my transfer from film to digital has definitely had its challenges.  For example, I vividly remember trying to figure out how to work my first digital SLR (a Nikon D2H) … I was on vacation and really using it for the first time, and was so frustrated that the exposure kept going all wacky on me.  It turns out that it was on bracketing mode and I didn’t realize it!  Hehe … it was only uphill from there.

When I started contributing to iStock, one of the first things I wanted to master the white-background effect.  I did some research, and thanks to Strobist I was able to create my own little soft-box out of a cardboard box, see-through white paper and poster board (oh, and sunlight, of course).  This is one of my photos I took with that cute little box.

Eventually I wanted to photograph people, so I invested in some background equipment, and also some AlienBees strobes.  I honestly had no idea what I was doing!  My setup was one light on the backdrop, located directly behind the subject, and two lights (each with soft-boxes) lighting the subject.  (This was in a small room … about the size of a small bedroom.)  I had some good luck and got some great shots (here’s one of them) but had very limited space in my little house in Hawaii.  It’s been well over a year and a half since I last did any white-background images, so I thought I would do some updated ones with my usual models.

Now that I have an entire garage at my disposal, I was able to bring the subject further from the backdrop and light the background with two lights, blocking any spill with a few bi-fold closet doors I got at Home Depot for $34 each.  I also used one of my Nikon speedlights as an additional light on the kids … here’s the photo of my complete setup.  The  above is a time-lapse of setting-up and a few finished images of my “studio” and photographing the kids.  Here’s a list of the equipment used in that shoot:

I believe that there is never an end to learning about photography, and so that’s why I put this little video together.  It’s because of other wonderful artists out there who share their tidbits of information about photography with the world that has brought me to where I am today, so I want to do what I can to spread the love, too.  So, with that said … please enjoy the video!