Max Lighting Food Photography

Posted in Food, Photography, Photojournalism, lighting by Gary Cosby Jr on October 25th, 2007

Time for a huge departure from our series of posts on shooting football. Lets try some indoor work and shoot some food. There is nothing in the world more appealing than a photo of food done right. On the other hand, if you don’t know what you are doing, food can be the most difficult thing to shoot next to scantly clad women, and don’t think I am joking. The most difficult job I ever shot was for a lingerie story. Try making that photo publishable in your family newspaper!

Maybe you work for a paper that doesn’t do food and you are tempted to bag this one. Read on my friend, read on. The skills you develop lighting food will stand you in good stead for a great many “table top” lighting setups plus this is the only assignment you get to eat when you are finished shooting. Now about the title. Why max lighting? Well, it is simple because I had five strobes and I used all five strobes so I maxed out my bag. I know, I know, it is very clever (chuckle!). In truth, the first photo incorporates only four lights. I added the fifth strobe to provide some fill on the skewers.

The food is the same in all shots and you will find a lighting diagram with this one thanks to an alert reader who gave a link to a down loadable pdf you can use to build lighting diagrams. You can get the download yourself at Fred Miranda and become a guru just like me. For this shoot, I positioned my two umbrella lights first to establish a baseline for the lighting. I then added the other three lights one at a time until I had what I was looking for. Each strobe after the umbrellas, whether snooted or not, was used to provide either accent light or fill light to keep the shadows from going too dark. My overall baseline umbrella exposure is about 2/3rds stop under the correct exposure so my other strobes are not blowing out the highlights.

The cool thing about food is that it doesn’t run away. As long as you time between assignments permits, you can play with lenses and lighting setups until you have a couple or three you like and each time you try something new that works you can add it to your bag of tricks. There is something else you need to see about these pictures. I have achieved three looks by doing nothing other than rotating the dish and by removing the mat from beneath the plate. This job was done freelance for the Southeast United Dairy Association and I was working with a person who really knows her stuff when it comes to food prep. She also knows a bit about presentation so my job is really easy.

My usual approach to shooting food for a newspaper, and this would be different if I were shooting for a magazine, is to use fairly high contrast lighting. You need the contrast to compensate for the toilet paper most newspapers print on. All that ink soaking in to that porous paper tends to flatten the image out so contrast is very important. I don’t usually go totally high contrast because you have to make the food look good. For newsprint I have found that the combination of soft and hard light works the best.