Food Photography - 4 Tips You Should Know When Photographing Foods

If you are new to food photography, then you must know these 4 tips about getting great looking food photographs. These 4 tips are: light your food sufficiently, keep your food fresh, make steam appear from your food and use bigger aperture. However these are not the only ways to make you food looks good as there are many more. But for now, you should start with these 4.

1. Give your foods sufficient lights

The first tip you must know is, in any kind of photography, in order for you to get the best photos, you must give your subject sufficient lights. Lights can be from ambient or flash. Ambient is light which is not produced by the photographer.

If you want to use ambient light only, the best bet is to place your food besides a window where there is plenty of natural light. You may also place a scrim between the window and your food. Scrim is a kind of translucent material which act as a diffuser to diffuse a light source.

You can also light your food using only flash. Do take note that you cannot use direct or bare flash because this will produce very unflattering pictures of your foods. The trick is to make your light source bigger, much bigger than your food. To make the light from your flash bigger, you can use the scrim, or you can attach a softbox to your flash. Softbox comes in many sizes such as 24"x36" and 32"x40". Once you have attached the softbox, get the food as close as possible to the softbox, but make sure it does not appear in you frame. This technique will produce a really nice, soft and flattering pictures of your food.

2. Keep your food fresh

The second tip is to make sure that your food is fresh. For instance, melted cheese will harden very fast and when that happens, it will no longer look appetizing.

3. Make steam appear from your food

Thirdly, if you can capture the steam rising off your freshly prepared food it will make you food much more appetizing and giving the look of freshly cooked. But this is really hard to do, so another alternative is to microwave a soak cotton balls and place them behind your foods.

4. Use bigger aperture when shooting low

When you are shooting at a lower angle, you should use bigger aperture to isolate your main subject and the background. This works very well when shooting foods which were arranged in a row. For this kind of shot, use a prime lens, like the 50mm. Try shooting with different apertures to get the effect that you are satisfied with. The 50mm prime lens will also prevent distortion on your subjects.

Nikon SB-900 Flash - Turning Off The Thermal Cut-Out Function

Jika sekiranya anda menggunakan flash Nikon SB-900 anda berkemungkinan pernah menghadapai masalah overheating yang menyebabkan flash anda tidak berfungsi buat sementara.

Jurutera-jurutera di Nikon telah membuat satu sistem, dimana untuk mengelakkan flash menjadi overheat, flash akan dimatikan selama 10 minit secara otomatik untuk menyejukkan flash apabila jumlah flash menyala secara berterusan tercapai. Berikut adalah jadual "Maximum Number of Continuous Firing":-

Untuk menutup fungsi ini, lakukan seperti ini :-

1. Hidupkan flash anda
2. Tekan butang "OK" selama satu saat sehingga "user menu" muncul
3. Pusingkan "Selector Dial" (scroll wheel) mengikut arah jam dan anda akan melihat user's menu highlight bar bergerak ke bawah. Scroll ke bawah sehingga highlight bar menanda ikon thermometer. Di sebelah kanan anda akan melihat menu pilihan On/Off
4. Tekan butang "OK" sekali dan dan anda akan dapati menu pilihan On/Off ditanda. Pusing "Selector Dial" sehingga menu pilihan "Off" ditanda dan tekan "OK" untuk mengesahkan pilihan
5. Tekan butang "Mode" (sebelah titik hijau) bawah label "Exit". Ini akan mengeluarkan anda daripada user's menu dan kembali kepada sistem operasi biasa

Sekarang anda boleh ambl gambar dengan berterusan tanpa ada gangguan lagi. Flash anda akan memberi amaran kepada anda dengan mesej Error di skrin dan bunyi beep, sekiranya ia menjadi terlalu panas. Jangan biarkan perkara ini berlarutan atau ia boleh menyebabkan flash anda rosak dan membatalkan jaminan (sekiranya ada)

Flash Photography Techniques-How Many Flash To Use

Here is another flash photography techniques which I think you should know. When you want to light your subject, how many flash should you use? 1, 2, 3 or 4? The answer is, it depends on what you want to do. So, it could be  1, 2, 3 or 4.

For me, I will start with 1 flash and it could be bare or not. By not, I maybe using umbrella or a softbox or any other kind of light modifier. If I think the light is not giving me the result that I want, then I will add another light and so on.

Here is an example of a picture I took at my niece wedding where I used only 1 flash. The flash is handheld and fired using a phottix trigger. Why I didn't placed it on my camera? Because it will produce unflattering pictures. It is more like DMV or JPJ (this is what we call in Malaysia) photos.

And here is the lighting diagram and also please excuse the drawing. It's the best I can do....

Concert Photography Lighting Fact

When you shoot concert please make sure that you do not use your flash. Why? Because there are already enough lights on the stage and adding another light will only make your picture look worse. Your flash will kill the colorful ambient lights. Let me show you some examples:

The top picture was taken without any flash and the bottom with an a flash attached to the camera. Notice the difference? So remember, no flash when shooting concerts. Capish?

By the way, the pictures above was taken at the Malam Gala Pelancongan Negeri Perak 2012 at Hotel Riverfront Ipoh and yours truly was the official photographer.