Real ice (left) and fake ice (right)

If you’ve ever tried to photograph a cold, iced beverage you probably realized how quickly the ice melts away. This is one reason that many food photographers and stylists will use fake ice in glasses of cold drinks. This is not only used in still photography … the next time you are watching a movie or TV show with someone holding a drink, take a look at the ice … it’s probably fake. It’s just not realistic to expect the ice to last during the time-frame that it takes to style and phtogoraph an image (or complete a TV/movie scene.)

Not only does the ice melt, but oftentimes it will end up looking foggy. In the image on the left I used ice from the ice-maker in my freezer … pretty standard house-hold ice. Some ice won’t look foggy like this, but if it’s not foggy then that means it probably will melt much more quickly. Fake ice, on the other hand, has a more “glassy” appearance and just looks better. You can find all sorts of shapes of fake ice for sale online—some are really expensive (the fancy, acrylic custom ice and splashes, for example). However I’ve had really good luck with some inexpensive fake ice … I usually just buy mine from Amazon.com (here’s a link to some ice I recently purchased for about $20.)

The down-side to a lot of fake ice is that it tends to sink to the bottom of the glass. Since most ice floats, then the way I get around this is to fill up a glass fully with ice … I’m typically using small glasses so this hasn’t been a problem so far.

BTW, if you want to learn more about food photography, I’m writing a book about it! Check it out here. :)

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/15 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I was cooking dinner tonight and, well, I ended up having a quick impromptu photo-shoot in my living room before devouring this tasty dish. When it all came together it looked so pretty, I just couldn’t help myself … even though I wasn’t planning to photograph it. :)

Another cool thing about this is that it’s my first attempt at cooking “sous-vide“, or, cooking food that is vacuum-sealed and immersed in hot water for a long period of time. Thankfully, salmon doesn’t take too long … about 20 minutes. Now, I don’t have a fancy-schmancy immersion ciruclator, so a pot of water set on low on my stove-top had to do. :) It’s an extremely healthy way to cook so I expect to do it a LOT more in the future.

For this dish, I used a raspberry-chipotle marinade I bought at the store, poured a little bit into a bag, then stuck it in the freezer to solidify the liquid just enough so it wouldn’t get sucked out of the bag when I vacuum-sealed it. Then, I used my FoodSaver to vacuum it shut, and stuck it in the hot water (a big pot of water set on “low”) for a little over 20 minutes. I topped it with berries and the remaining liquid from the bag and added a side of parsley to add a contrasting color to the plate.

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/10 sec at f/8, ISO 100

It’s been a busy week … lots of food photography, writing and staring at pixels on my computer. Today I photographed a PB&J, and I’ve got a few more food setups before I can pack the camera away for the day (and clean my never-ending messy kitchen). I’ve got a deadline on Monday, two more chapters and some final edits before I can breathe and my food photography book will be off to the printer! I can’t wait. :)

Also, if you have any favorite recipes or food photo ideas, be sure to add them to the comments in an earlier blog post (here’s the link) for a chance to get a free copy of my book when it’s released.

We changed the cover of my Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots book! So don’t be alarmed if you were used to seeing the other version … I hope you all like it. :)

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 5D mark II, Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens, 1/10 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Here’s a quick post … I’ve been pretty side-tracked from the blog the past week as I’ve been busy working on my new food photography book. I’ve got a few tutorials planned, and a whole bunch of food photo-shoots over the next few weeks, so I’ll post more goodies, tips, tricks and randomness in the near future. In the meanwhile, enjoy this delicious plate of pesto fettuccini pasta topped with basil and pine nuts. Super yum! :)

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/60 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Since today is “National Eggs Benedict Day” (seriously) I thought I’d celebrate by posting a tasty image on my blog. :) Eggs Benedict is also one of my favorite dishes … maybe I should go and celebrate properly, lol.

Head on over to the Learn Food Photography website to listen to an interview I did with Neel about food photography! :)

Some of you may already know that I’m writing another book, and you might also know that this next one will be about food photography! I’m really excited about this book, it’s so far been a really fun process and I’ve also been creating a lot of yummy photos to go in it (which you’ve probably already previewed if you read my blog). This will be my third book with Peachpit and another addition to the “Snapshots to Great Shots” series. I was waiting for the cover-shot to be updated on Amazon with the final image before I posted this to my blog, so here it is! It’s officially official and is available for pre-order on Amazon.com, and it should be in print and released sometime late Summer (August-ish).

This book is for anyone interested in food photography. Whether you’re new to photography or have been a photographer for years, you’ll find a lot of relevant information on how to photograph, style and even edit your food photographs on the computer. The first two chapters are geared towards beginning photographers, as I explain the basics of photography and gear that can be used when photographing food. In the rest of the book I talk about light, styling, props, composition, editing in Adobe Photoshop and also an entire chapter on behind-the-scenes setups from start-to-finish to include styling, lighting (with BTS illustrations and photographs), and the editing process.

Also, if you have a favorite recipe and want a chance to win a copy of my food photography book, head on over to an earlier blog post to post your recipe or food idea for a chance to win my book when it’s released.

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.