I am discovering, I think, my style in the food photography approach . I am laughing, because my style means mostly no tripod. The camera on tripod drives me nuts. I want to move around the table, trying different angles, from sides and from lower or higher. The tripod just limits my movements, even as convenient and easy to use as the last one we bought. Yes, in most cases you can adjust it really quickly, you can change the heights by quickly adjusting legs, but for example going from vertical to horizontal and back is major operation. The bottom line- we usually make first shot on tripod, carefully adjusting lights and focal length. When we are happy with this image, the camera goes in hand and everything is possible . That how I finally ended up with this image, when all the higher angle approches were just not working that well.

Some more on the subject of fruit and veggies on the white seamless background. I was playing worth matching different fruit with each other, to contrast their colors. The resulting image with an apple looked quite interesting, but how about turning it black and white and adjusting saturation of resulting greys? I think an image looks even better.

The steel cube is called Alamo, and you can find it in Astor Place in New York. I don’t think it is a widely photographed New York landmark, and the difficulty in finding an angle probably contributes . I actually found it only because I had too much time on my hands and wanted to discover just this part of town and on foot. I like the contrast between the simple shape of the cube and the complicated detail in the building behind it, as well the contrast of their colors.

The image was taken here.

There are not many books on food photography. But when you think about, food photography is not different than any other studio-product type of photography. The trick is in knowing how to prepare food for shooting session. I picked up the book “Food photography and styling” by John F. Carafoli from university library. The book isn’t very recent, it was published in 1992. Most of the images in the book are heavily dated, dark lit, white balance is on the side yellowish cast. There are some simple scene lighting schemes presented, but they are not focus of the book. Maybe because the book not written by photographer – the author is an accomplished food stylist. The strength of the book lies in tips and techniques of making food look good on the photograph. Some techniques are already well established in the field, and can be found elsewhere (for example in another good read, Digital Food Photography by Lou Manna). But it is good to know how to make artificial ice cream, so it doesn’t melt on the set; to use margarine because it has better color than butter and to put salami on the pizza when it comes out of the oven, instead of before, because it tends to shrink and change color. The book is full of them, and there is a short glossary of additional advice at the end.
Because the book is written by food stylist, the food images were photographed by people other then author. I was able to find some of the names featured in the book on the Internet and learn more about their work. Jack Richmond seems to have the biggest food portfolio of all of them, it is really worth checking out. Karol Caplan work is more on fine art side, very subtle, but interesting. Brian Hagiwara is a stock photographer with large variety of images, many of them food.

I was adding some feed to bird feeder, when I noticed this piece of ice below the table on my balcony. I snapped an image with an iPhone, and run some filters in Best Camera (you can check out the recipe here). Are you seeing any animal in that? I saw a fish with its mouth up, or a small critter sitting on its back with paws up.

Struggling along with food photography and going beyond plain veggies on white background, we worked with patatoe soup this weekend. I am noticing that I prefer closer, tighter views rather then wide images of the whole set.
We are discovering how many items is enough on the set, and I am very picky in color matching-contrast for those props. I might be on too minimalistic side, but I think I really like simple, light compositions. On the other hand, they might be dated in 10 years .

My latest submissions to stocks were quite a success. All my images were accepted in Bigstockphoto, and most of the batch got into iStock. Current count is 25 images in Bigstock, 15 images in iStock. I lost with Shutterstock again, and I was really upset. They rejected the images they liked last time, I added them to the batch as sure winners. Well, it is like all the contests and scientific papers, I suppose, it all depends on the person viewing as much as quality of your work, and this time it must have gotten to different checker. I guess what surprised me more was the time it took to process my submissions, I got rejection from Shutterstock right on Sunday, within 24 hours, the BigStockPhoto, as usual, send me comments next business day, and even iStock got me feedback on Tuesday. Must have been slow weekend.
In any case, the number of images we submitted were vegetables on white background, which can have multiple uses for designers. I really like this one, with bunch of asparagus in a glass, they look like mug with pencils on a desk.

Last week’s photo of the set with a bottles of wine got some behind-the-scenes critique. Well deserved, I suppose, it was probably not the most interesting shot. It was busy, but it was supposed to illustrate the point. On the other hand, we were playing with a wine bottle and glass set for a while, it we still cannot master the lighting. On that, and on cherries . Probably because of all the reflective surfaces. But today’s blog image is one of my favorites so far- although you can see the umbrellas reflecting in the bottle and the glass, it has an elegant feel to it. I like the brown background, and I wormed up the tones a little bit to get this atmosphere.

I took this image with HDR in mind when I was walking around Greenwich Village in New York in December. I was exploring NYU campus, as my husband suggested few nice photographic opportunities. I found this shaded walkway in front of School of Law and stopped by to photograph. I love the detail the HDR provides for architectural photography. Just look at the texture of the ceiling.

The image was taken here.

There is a series of best National Geographic images photo books. “Wide angle” with photographs of places, “In focus” with most interesting portraits and “Through the lens” with general best images. We picked them up from the local library – it was a few pounds of books . They made for an interesting browsing for few evenings.
I am an avid reader of National Geographic magazine (although their marketing mail drives me nuts!), and I am really fond on their images. But when you really have a chance to look at them without the context of the story, you are going to be surprised. In the books, there are new and old images included, some are from digital era, some from film times, there are pictures as old as from 1910! They are often grainy, out of focus, technically not perfect at all. Although composition in most cases is sticking to the rules. Some of them work, some are … weird? Which makes you consider, that image does not to be technically perfect to do what it needs to do – illustrate the story. And then it is better to take high ISO image or no image at all .
Another observation I made was how often I do not pay attention to photographers name on the articles. I knew few names of the artistss included in the collections, I recognized Reza (I heard about him on some podcast in context of war photography), Annie Griffith Belt (I read her book some time ago) and Frans Lanting (from his column in Outdoor Photographer). But there are people I never heard of before, like Sam Abel, Jodi Cobb, or Gerd Ludwig, and these are people whose images are dominating in the series!