Food Shoot #11 – Vegetable Medley

Photos taken November 14th, 2012

This food shoot was our last one for the semester. The final group brought in peppers, onions and garlic for us to photograph. The bright, vibrant colors were really fun to work with. For lighting, we once again set up the two fill lights with diffuser umbrellas.

WHAT WORKED:

The top image was my favorite because I felt the composition was the most dynamic and interesting. The organization of the objects keeps the viewer’s eye moving throughout the photograph better than in my other images. I like that the red pepper and the white onion balance each other so neither part of the picture is more dominant. The other vegetables add interest to the composition as well.

I also really liked the following four images. I really like the composition of the picture on the top left, but I still feel the top down view doesn’t do the food justice. The picture on the lower left is one of the only vertical pictures that I liked this semester as well. As for the picture on the bottom right, I like the composition but I felt the white background detracted from the image.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK:

I tried taking some pictures that focused on just one vegetable, but I didn’t feel that any of those pictures were very interesting. The fact that only one color and/or shape appeared in those pictures made them kind of boring to look at. I also tried taking pictures of just pieces of vegetables, but those did not turn out very well either. I think that the pictures where I photographed a combination of colors (three or more) were the most interesting. The following photographs are some of the ones I did not like for the aforementioned reasons.

 

Food Shoot #10 – Biscotti and Tea

Photos taken November 7th, 2012

Last week’s group brought in homemade chocolate peanut-butter biscotti and tea. They also brought in some fancy teacups and matching plates to really portray the feeling of a nice afternoon tea party. We have not worked with liquids very much for our food shoots up to this point, so I was really happy that they brought in tea for us to photograph. Again, we used the fill lights with diffuser umbrellas to light the set.

WHAT WORKED:

I really liked the color scheme for this food shoot – not only does the cool grey background really allow the warmly-colored biscotti to pop, it gives the impression that the tea in the cups is Earl Grey. The top picture is my favorite because the composition keeps the viewer’s eye moving throughout the picture. The line of biscotti in the background draw the viewer’s eye to the teacup, then to the biscotti on the tea saucer and then to the spoon. The spoon leads the viewer’s eye up the plate in the background, which then curls their attention back to the line of biscotti. I also really liked how the shallow depth of field turned out in this photograph.

Below are some of my other favorite photographs from this shoot:

WHAT DIDN’T WORK:

I tried to take some shallow depth-of-field pictures of the biscotti on the plate in the same way that they were lined up in the top picture, but because they are all the same shape and height, the shot just did not work very well. Overhead shots did not seem to work very well either. I took some pictures of the teacup and biscotti from above, but shooting the teacup from that angle took away virtually all of its recognizability and made for a poor image.

An overhead shot involving both teacups and the plate of biscotti turned out to be a little more interesting, but I still feel that the image is lacking.

 

Food Shoot #9 – Spider Cookies and Pumpkin Snack Mix

Photos taken October 29th, 2012

This week was my group’s turn to bring in food. Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday, so I was thrilled when I found out that our food shoot would be the week of Halloween. We made some chocolate Spider Cookies and Pumpkin Snack Mix for the shoot and brought in lots of props and decorations to compliment the theme. We set up the two fill lights with diffuser umbrellas since that seems to provide the best lighting.

WHAT WORKED:

The photograph at the top of this post is my favorite of the ones I took because of the composition and color. All the little snippets of orange (in the pumpkin props, the napkin, and the candies) really work to keep the viewer’s eye moving throughout the image. I also used some shallow depth of field in this image – the snack mix is slightly blurred at the back, adding visual interest, but most of the dish is in focus so the viewer can see the food in detail. The props, being lower than the snack mix, also ended up being a bit blurry. I thought this was nice because it keeps the viewer’s focus on the food.

I’m a little sad that I didn’t get any of my spider cookies in my top image, but I think it probably would have been too many things in one photograph. To make up for this, the image below is my favorite one that I took of the spider cookies. The top down view really worked for these cookies because it hides the fact that they were so tall (because you have to stick two cookies together to make them, the spiders ended up being a bit round). I also really like how their red eyes and legs pop against the black plate. Their legs also point to each other in a circular fashion, keeping the viewer’s eyes moving from cookie to cookie. The purple cloth to the left does a good job of adding some interest to that otherwise empty space.

The following four pictures are some of my other favorites.

EXPERIMENTATION:

One thing I did for this shoot that I had never done before was play around with my camera’s white balance. Up til this point the “auto” setting has done a good job for me, but I noticed while I was taking pictures that the camera was choosing colors very inconsistently – sometimes the tablecloth looked blue, and other times it looked pink. In any case, I did not feel that it was representing the color accurately. To fix this, I tried out the different white balance settings on my camera – tungsten, cool-white fluorescent, direct sunlight, cloudy and shade. In the end, I decided that cool-white fluorescent gave me the truest color (as can be seen in the above photographs).

Below are some examples of what changing the color balance did to my photos (they’re not the best images, but they do a good job of showing the difference in color). The image on the right has the WB set to tungsten, and the image on the left has the WB set to flash.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK:

I had some problems getting both the snack mix and the spiders to fit into the pictures. The image on the top right of my “like pictures” compilation is one of the only pictures I took that included both food items on separate plates/bowls that actually seemed to work. Other than that, the pictures I took of similar compositions ended up looking too forced.

We had also brought in some orange plates and napkins to put the cookies on, but I was unhappy with how the red legs looked against the orange. They just blended together too much. The images below show this problem. (As both images were taken with the auto white balance setting, they also show how much the color of my photographs was changing before I switched to cool-white fluorescent.)