Food Photos
Coffee
Savory Dishes
Sweet Dishes
Working with DSLR Camera Settings and Choosing a Lens
I recently took a two-week food photography course with PlantLab Culinary and want to share some of the work done in that course. We did a few still life images as you'll see below, but mostly plant-based food photography. Any images shown here are my own dishes prepared from scratch and photographed to demonstrate different aspects of DSLR camera use. All of these photos were taken with the Nikon D3400 and an 18-55mm zoom lens.
Lessons learned at the start of this course included choosing manual settings, using prime vs. zoom lens, making adjustments to white balance settings to ensure the whites in the images are vibrant and clean, and depth of field.
Shutter Speed and Blur Motion
Cafe Mocha
Lessons learned with shutter speed and blur motion involve the broad range of speeds that will stop motion. The first three coffee images were taken with shutter speeds in the 1-2 second range, while the salad dressing was taken with 1/50 second shutter speed. These were also taken in natural daylight without the use of strobes or flash of any kind which would allow for faster shutter speeds. It was an interesting experiment, and I think I could benefit from some extra practice.Time permitting, I'll take some new photos and upload them for comparison.
Selective Focus
Grains
These images were taken with selective focus and varying depths of field.
Depth of Field
Cacao Mint Creme
A big lesson learned here was that angled shots look fine with some of the objects blurred to create focus where needed. However, when taking overhead shots, use a larger depth of field to capture detail throughout the image because having only the top plane in clear focus on an overhead shot is not ideally going to show the full beauty or complexity of the dish.
Week One Review
Lettuce, Flowers, and Fine Herbs
Fruit Carpaccio, Rose Water, and Pistachios
Quality and Quantity of Natural Light
Mushrooms in Daylight
Direction and Angle of Light
Coffee Break
Diffusion: Use of silks to soften light that may be causing blown out highlights or reflections off glossy and glass surfaces.
Fill Light: Use of white cards to bounce soft light back into the photograph.
Contrast: Use of black cards to deepen shadows or reduce glare bouncing off glass and metal.
Highlight: Use of mirrors and reflectors to focus stronger light on a specific area of the image that is dark and lacks detail.
Fill Light: Use of white cards to bounce soft light back into the photograph.
Contrast: Use of black cards to deepen shadows or reduce glare bouncing off glass and metal.
Highlight: Use of mirrors and reflectors to focus stronger light on a specific area of the image that is dark and lacks detail.
Additional Practice with Light Shaping
Composition
Clementines
Direction and Angle of Light
Breads
- The two jam photos were taken with top lighting as the main light source and diffused lighting coming from the left side, resulting in a clean overall light. The photo with the knife shows blown out highlights on the jam pot.
- The jam photo without the knife shows use of fill light to emphasize the jam in the pot without too many distracting highlights. The background was also swapped out and the overall look is a warmer, more inviting shot.
- The lighting on the muffins was an angled light from top left of the scene and results in a nice gradient across the background, with highlights on the stack and enough light on the toasted muffin to show detail.