A Little News

I love to mix lighting for food shots. By mixed lighting, I mean using both direct and indirect. In many cases I will use some sort of device to modify my direct light. Maybe I will shoot through the floral arrangement on the table or use the table ware or a chair back to block some of the direct light to give a nice mix of shadow and highlight. You just need to look around and see what is available to use as a light modifier and try it.

First of all, I use my soft light source to establish the baseline exposure as I talked about in the post on Max Lighting For Food. This allows you to use your other light or lights to kick some highlights and contrast into the image without damaging your overall exposure. You can also use the overall ambient light in the room to help you establish a lighting mood. Remember that mood has a lot to do with the color of the light so watch the color temp of your light sources. Many times during the day, your ambient light coming through the windows will have a blue cast to it, especially on an overcast day or on one of those days when you have a high, blue sky. Of course, later in the day you will have a lovely warm source coming through your windows. At times you will want to make use of this light and at other times you will want to kill it. You know that manipulating your shutter speed is the way to do this. When you are strobing any job, your shutter speed determines how much of the ambient light affects your overall exposure.

Now, on both of these shots there is a mix of soft light and hard light. There is nothing fancy in either photo and they are both lit about the same way. The baseline soft light is a strobe bounced off the ceiling of the room and the accent light is a direct strobe. Just as a side note here, if you are using a bounce light as your soft source, check the color of your ceiling and walls because they will create a color cast. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. The shot of the grits, yes that is the old Southern favorite all dressed up, also presents one of the problems you can face. The dish it is served in is silver and reflects everything. If I were redoing this shot I would certainly do something to knock down the glare on the silver or spread it out with a nice, white reflector. The accent light on the grits is a monolight fired at table top height aimed right across the top of the dish to create texture in the food.

On the shot of the carrot cake, I used the same light setup but used Nikon strobes rather than monolights. I used a Lensbaby 2.0 on this shot too which gives the shot the soft focus effect. The lens baby can somewhat simulate the use of a tilt/shift lens if it is used carefully. It works on some food shots and is absolutely useless on others. The thing to remember is to use some type of modifier for your direct light so that it doesn’t flood the image with hard light. The hard light is just an accent.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.