Mixed Light For Food
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.
Max Lighting Food Photography
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.
Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
