I settled for the shot of the orange slice on the glass of water. The point of intersection of the slice and glass is where the thirds cross, which makes image appropriate for the challenge. But what I really like here are the bright colors in this image and the fresh feel to it.

I just decided that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No other gives me four days of vacation. Americans are smart with having holidays on particular day of the week, other then particular day of the months. Like Christmas comes on Sunday this year- what a waste of perfectly good day off work :).

Yesterday, I spend whole day in the kitchen. With repurposing leftover turkey and photographing the process, I don’t even notice when it was past dinner, time to rent a movie online before going to bed. I guess needed a break from it all, and to do something else then usual. Plus, there is not much to photograph outside, as I learned the hard way last week. Kitchen was a promising option to look for subjects.
How are you spending the time off?

I spent the most time on this image trying to style it and put the elements together. The wooden board did not produce enough contrast with chips. I started and ended with green place mat. Without chips, something was clearly missing from the story, but the chips itself did not produce sufficient interest. But I love the highlights on the salsa, and the sharpness of the image.

I have only one more idea for a tomato based dish for yet another photo in the project. So, if you know any good recipe involving tomatos and would like to share it, please let me know in the comments.

At least, I knew better then to prepare food and then set up to photograph it. The setting up the studio came first. With recent remodeling in the house, I can use the “shelf” currently doubling as dinner table as the workbench. It makes for easy photographing close to where cooking action happens. I took one of Nicole Young’s setups from her book on food photography as a guide to set up my light, and I was determined to use just one flash, behind the scene, as she did. Luckily, the typical light stands are tall, as behind my table is my hallway :). That’s where I positioned the medium soft box first, and later decided to go with umbrella. I am not entirely sure yet, why one worked better then the other. Following my husband’s advice and the way Strobist would do it, I set up the camera’s shutter speed to give no ambient light exposure (black screen as on the first photo in top row below) at desired aperture (f/9) and enough power on the flash behind shot through umbrella to light almost all the scene (second photo in top row below). Manually. I do believe in manual flash set-up, and if there is one thing I know how to do in lighting, is setting up multiple flashes power. It is not possible, of course, to lit the whole scene with just one light source, so I added a reflector, with its silver side, to fill in the shadows on the left, opposite the flash (third photo in top row below). And here is where the problem with one flash started. I added white boards up front to fill also the dark front of my scene (my two toasts working as stand-in food, fourth photo in top row below). The effect was nowhere close to what I wanted.

I start to agree with my husband that you cannot lit food well with just one flsh. I am not sure why other’s, like Nicole, can pull it off. Maybe it depends on studio location, set up size or type of food. Look at those images by Nicole, they are also in her “Food photography” book. I find the front of the stir-fry with noodles too dark (left image). It was the set up with soft-box behind the plate slightly to the left, with reflector on the right and fill-in boards on the left (it is figure 3.23 in the book). Similar positioning of light elements, just umbrella and reflector a bit towards the back, and totally different tonality in food on this pasta dish (figure 3.26 in the book) and it is not as noticeable. But look at the difference in my toast photos (fourth photo top row is white boards, fifth photo top row is second flash on minimum power).

With the studio set-up ready, it was time to work on pizza. And photograph every step, with the same set up, of course (I was just slighly changing the position and power on second flash as needed). We followed the original Lowe’s recipe very loosely. We typically make the crust from the pre-mixed ingredients, sold in any grocery store. Just add water kind. After short time to rise (first image bottom row, above), the dough is formed in the shape (circle, this time, as on third photo bottom row, above) and baked shortly by itself. Afterwards, was the hardest part of the whole project in my opinion. As there are no good books as far as I can tell, which will tell you how to really compose your scene. Where to put the ingredients. I knew I have many colors and textures in my veggies (third photo bottom row, above). I knew if I position them too regularly, it will not look good. Neither would putting them totally at random. I am not sure what exactly I did this time, but I am quite happy with how it turned out on the final image (last two photos at the bottom, above). I am also very happy how the images turned out overall- almost no post was needed to make them look as you see them below. Remember, you can click on the images to look at larger versions.

And the lesson learned- shoot more. Now, with winter coming, the awful Polish weather behind windows, I am surely be spending more time again shooting in the studio. Hopefully, soon I will feel as desperate as I was yesterday, not knowing what to do first.

Many times was I already complaining on this blog how difficult it is to shoot objects on white, isolating background. And then I found out, that masters of product or food photography have the same problem, they just approach it differently. Only part of white is achieved in the studio, the rest is done in post. So I had to learn how to do it.
I am going to show an example of an image, similar to a series I recently prepared for a microstock. This one is shot with Lensbaby, and a bit closer then the shots I chose to submit. You can see that the background is more grey then white. Some stock agencies, like Bigstock are especially particular about isolating white being really 255 white.
To be able to see it even better, in both Lightroom and Photoshop I will change background colors to pure white. This also helps to see if the white balance is correct in the image, as any yellow or blue cast will be easier to spot and adjust. Then I would do typical adjustments- add Clarity and Vibrance, set Tone Curve to Strong and add some Blacks/Fill Light or whatever is needed to improve exposure. After that, I will look at the image to decide, how elaborate backgrund fix is needed. For most images, I would need to do the well feathered selection in CS5. I typically use Quick Selection tool to select object from the background, make a Layer mask out of it, which in turn I can adjust using black and white brush. With that, I typically just increase brightness of the white until it doesn’t differ from the background in the software.
But there are images, like this, where tools available in Lightroom are sufficient. I would use Adjustment Brush sometimes. There are situations where even only Vignette will do. In this case, with only two colors in the image, I actually increased Brightness, and then lowered the Luminance of orange and blue colors.