Copyright (c) 2011 Nicolesy, Inc - Nicolesy (All Rights Reserved)

Copyright (c) 2011 Nicolesy, Inc - Nicolesy (All Rights Reserved)

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. :)

Copyright (c) 2011 Nicolesy, Inc - Nicolesy (All Rights Reserved)

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.

Copyright (c) 2011 Nicolesy, Inc - Nicolesy (All Rights Reserved)

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.

Copyright (c) 2011 Nicolesy, Inc - Nicolesy (All Rights Reserved)