Showing posts with label 365 days of food photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 365 days of food photography. Show all posts
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.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Food Photography - August 2015 #foodphotography
This series of Food Photography is something that I look forward to share with you. A process of continuous learning that I do through the months.. apart from the well styled end products. This month is all about some colourful baby peppers, chayote , vegetable crate and some cookies..
Styling / Set up in this set of images is slightly different from my usual ones.. and I ended up discovering some new techniques and cheats in my work.. Delightful moments this month!!
Styling / Set up in this set of images is slightly different from my usual ones.. and I ended up discovering some new techniques and cheats in my work.. Delightful moments this month!!
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Food Photography - March 2015 #foodphotography
I am extremely overwhelmed when this picture received a lot of appreciation and some postive comments in food photography groups.
All the positive feedback and critique comments makes a difference and helps in doing the task better.
It has been one fabulous week in terms of food photography. I have enrolled for Neel's LFP course and the assignments gets delivered to your inbox for 30 days. Everyday we have something new to learn , new to understand and a new dimension to our way of looking at images.
I have never looked at an image like that !! Well " that" means nothing strange..But in an altogether variant direction.
Studying the images of some professional photograph was the begining of the course. Can you imagine, this can change our magnitude of reading an image . Helen Dujardin , writer of Plate to Pixel has been my all time favourite . But now I have a growing list - Aran Goyoaga, Penny De Los Santos, Beatrice Peltre
We knew Depth of Focus( DOF) , but what was unknown was how the varying DOF can have a varying impact on the image.
Title - Chocolate Chip CupCakes
Next concept that we were told was about Finding the Right Angle & Framing .
Repeately clicked clicked and I sat to analyze... I was amazed ... Since there was no pressure about clicking for a post , no pressure in food getting cold - I picked the camera and snapped the camera in all directions. Absolute satisfaction and some amazing results..
Vertical framing has become soo much a habit , it had become absolutely hard to think about Horizontal framing. I used to find Horizontal framing absolutely abnormal and would never dare to place the subject ( food ) and its components to suit the abnormal way.
But during this exercise and after , I am training myself to make a conscious effort for framing in either ways.. Its working !!
I loved the horizontal framing for this subject . Do you agree with me?
Yet another new concept that was introduced to us was to Create a story line for your image. We all know about cooking your food, placing them in the frame and just shoot. When Neel introduced this theory, I actually rackled my head hard. I knew exactly what goes into my frame , but then this new theory actually got me thinking in terms of story lines . It can be very simple , non fussy but must have a story associated with it.
With just raw vegetables I began to think and drafted a story to associate with it.
1. Tomatoes
Here goes my story - One summer afternoon, we go Tomato picking and they are indeed red,juicy and lovely. I begin to cut them .
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Food Photography - June & July 2015 #foodphotography
The month of June & July has been an overdose of fun, chitchatting, travelling and celebration time with family visiting us. I had so many of my learnings/ pictures to share that I skipped this post last month.
I promise you a double dose from both the month's - May and June.
This series has been soo popular and well received, I barely wanted to skip the post , even if I am late.
Street Food can never go overboard at-least for me !! Pictures of Pav bhaji in my blog are already good enough for Food Gawker or other food porn sites. Still I never get overboard , restyling and re shooting them :) Here's my take on them !!
Ragda Pattice is yet another favorite street food . Most friends and family who have visited home , have had it atleast once :) There is always a request for more retakes !!
Vegetable Bean Burger is one of my favourite !! I had a tough time shooting them... All my pictures are ready, still the recipe has not made it to the post.. Hope in month's time, the recipe and pictures make it to a post .
Royal Gala Apples
This set of pictures were quite special to me . The basket in the image was gifted to me by my daughter's teacher.. She knew I was looking for one of these kinds... Isnt that kind of her ?
I promise you a double dose from both the month's - May and June.
This series has been soo popular and well received, I barely wanted to skip the post , even if I am late.
Street Food can never go overboard at-least for me !! Pictures of Pav bhaji in my blog are already good enough for Food Gawker or other food porn sites. Still I never get overboard , restyling and re shooting them :) Here's my take on them !!
Ragda Pattice is yet another favorite street food . Most friends and family who have visited home , have had it atleast once :) There is always a request for more retakes !!
Vegetable Bean Burger is one of my favourite !! I had a tough time shooting them... All my pictures are ready, still the recipe has not made it to the post.. Hope in month's time, the recipe and pictures make it to a post .
Cherries !! Plums !!Sigh ! Appa Amma returned from their trip of Alps and bring me a box of Cherries. I just couldn't stop snapping these beauties. Went on and on , changed the layout, bg and what not and again went back snapping.
One of those trips to our local market , Amma handpicked these plums..and then you know what happened to them ... :)
This set of pictures were quite special to me . The basket in the image was gifted to me by my daughter's teacher.. She knew I was looking for one of these kinds... Isnt that kind of her ?
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