Thursday, November 19, 2015
Food Photography Experiments and Review #foodphotography
I am so excited to share about this wonderful opportunity that came through a couple of months ago. Reviewing a photography course from MyPhotoSchool. Course is spread over 8 weeks with bi-weekly video tutorials, assignments as well as personal help and feedback from the tutor.
Choosing the exposure for a photograph is both alarmingly simple and infinitely complex. Simple because there is just one dosage of light that will be right for you, controlled by just three settings: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity. Complex because it affects everything about the image, what you wanted it to be, and its effect on your audience. Understanding how and why exposure works as it does is worth every effort, because it is not an automatic process, whatever camera manufacturers claim. There is no universally ‘right’ exposure for any situation, but there may be one ‘right’ exposure for you personally.
Hence the course is titled Michael Freeman's Perfect Exposure MasterClass.
All our assignments require to process our files from Raw to Jpeg with no adjustment to exposure and brightness. As our goal is to achieve the perfect exposure right in the shot.
Over the next 6 weeks, I will be posting my assignment notes and my conclusions from the experiments and learnings out here.
Assignment 1: Judging scene contrast (3 images)
Find and photograph three different scenes. One should be normal in the sense that you want it to be averagely bright, the second should be a scene that you want to present as dark, and the third should be one that you prefer to be bright.
For this exercise, I have chosen three of my favourite pictures - Moong Dal,Pears in dark background and Mint Sprigs with Lemon. In all the three examples above, I have shared before and after editing images.
Find and photograph three different scenes. One should be normal in the sense that you want it to be averagely bright, the second should be a scene that you want to present as dark, and the third should be one that you prefer to be bright.
For this exercise, I have chosen three of my favourite pictures - Moong Dal,Pears in dark background and Mint Sprigs with Lemon. In all the three examples above, I have shared before and after editing images.
I have shot all of them in Manual Exposure.
Assignment 2 : Choosing an appropriate metering method (3 images)
For this exercise of Mixed Vegetable Korma, I did 4 pictures with different metering modes - Spot, centre weight, partial metering and evaluate metering. The pictures with spot and partial metering were shortlisted to my requirement. Since I wanted to achieve a dark background but at the same time , keep the focus and ensure enough light is on the curry the chosen metering did just what I wanted.
From the Spot and Partial, there was a very slight difference in the images. There was little cast of shadow on the right hand side at the edges of the curry in the Spot metering image whilst in the Partial, it was just what I wanted.
With the Pistachio still life, just as the previous set, I conducted an experiment by shooting in all the 4 metering modes. Since it is a backlit image, evaluate metering was the right choice.
The set up for Lemon and Mint Sprigs was simple . White background and a backlit image. Looking at all the 4 metering results, Evaluate metering gave me the right exposure, as desired.
Assignment 3: Choosing a preferred exposure/shooting mode (2 images)
This assignment required us to choose different scenes and shoot with three exposure modes - Aperture Priority,Shutter Priority and Manual .Also need to document what is the advantage of shooting in each of the modes for the particular scene and finally to document the most appropriate mode.
I conducted my first trial with the Pistachios , set on the dark background and backlit. Shooting in Manual and Aperture did not pose any challenge as everything seems to b the same in exif. But Shutter priority was obviously not the right choice. All that I could set was the shutter speed and the camera decided the focal length based on that. Obviously in a still life scenario, that is the last thing you want. I would love to have a complete control of the scenario.
For the second set, I chose my sifting flour image. This is one of my favourite images and I had been sifting flour and cocoa powder for a couple of hours that day.
For an action- motion shot , there needs to be enough light in the scenario. In the Aperture priority mode with the same settings, I was not able to get the enough action that I wanted to capture. Using Shutter priority, I caught the action needed but not with enough depth of field. So I decided to stick to Manual Mode and that gave me the desired result.
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