We were sitting in our favorite sushi place. They had a dessert special. Chocolate cake with strawberry sauce. We not only ordered it, but also photographed . Kind of before and after short story on the chocolate cake.

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.

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 .

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.

Sometimes best ideas come to me just after we called it a day in the studio and started to put things down. This time was no different. We’ve spent a couple of hours playing with this bunch of tomatoes. But it was when I take our flash case when I saw gel lying there and instantly wanted to play with them a little more. Using 1/3ev orange filter on key light made tomatoes look like they were catching some morning light. I like this one the best from the whole series.

We baked this banana bread on one of week nights. It was irresistible, though. We took it downstairs to our home studio and experiment with our home-made macro described in this post just last week. I really enjoy the close-ups of things, especially food items. It gives you this intimate almost detail. A bit unusual perspective as well.

With Lent approaching next week, and carnival coming to an end, it is time for frying doughnuts for Doughnut Friday. With the new recipe from my mom, we made the best doughnuts ever. They are almost gone by now…

Another shot from the studio session with two flashes and corn flakes. And another shot from having fun with macro set for Lensbaby.

We decided again to participate in Digital Photography School Weekend challenge. We are rather guilty of cherry-picking the subjects, although putting together both of our creativity and some time on weekends, we managed almost anything. This time, Good Morning challenge took us to photograph our Saturday breakfast. We ended up eating it cold, in lunch time!