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.

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....

Studio Photo With Megat and Epiphone

This is my latest studio photo project with Megat and his Epiphone. What is Epiphone? It's a guitar and it costs him a few thousands. So knowing that he has this Epiphone, I decided to call him up and ask if he would like to photograph his guitar. And he said yes..

So on one fine day he came to my studio and brought along 2 guitars. The Epiphone and i don't remember the other one. Then just before we started shooting he told me he forgot to bring his guitar strap. So we went   to his house (which is so far away), get the strap and return to my studio and start shooting.

For this picture, I placed an octabox on camera left and a bare flash also on camera left pointing towards the wall.

And for this picture, I placed a beauty dish on camera right and a bare flash at the back of Megat. I also dimmed the ambient to hide the ugly red curtain.

Portrait Photography

Wikipedia define portrait photography as "photography of a person or group of people that displays the expression, personality, and mood of the subject. Like other types of portraiture, the focus of the photograph is usually the person's face, although the entire body and the background or context may be included."

Portrait photography can be done outdoors or indoors and they both require lighting be it ambient or flash. But for me, if you want to make great photos, then you should use both ambient and flash. Let me show you a creative portrait photography using both lighting.

The picture above is taken outdoor at a lake in Pengkalan Hulu. Lightings are from ambient (the sun) and 1 bare flash. I reduced the ambient lights and the flash lit my subject from behind thus creating the silhouette on the umbrella.

Here is another example:

In this setup, I used the sun (dimmed of course), 1 flash with umbrella on camera left and 1 flash on camera right to light the shrubs.

Oh... if you ever want your portrait taken by me, or any other kind of photography, please do not hesitate to contact me @ hizer1970@gmail.com