I finally found time to go shopping for the ingredients for Matt’s summer salad. I wanted to take part in Lara Ferroni challenge, and make and photograph non-salad based salad. Of course, I had to improvise, and my recipe doesn’t contain mint nor yellow tomatoes. But I was able to find edible green leaves not being salad (namely parsley) and we bought some yellow bell pepper to have enough colors.
I build the salad from watermelon, yellow bell pepper, tomato, grapes, cucumber and feta-type cheese. Put it out on the glass garden table and used early afternoon sun to backlight the subject. I added a couple of peppers, matching the colors on the salad and a bunch of parsley to fill the space, as I couldn’t find any interesting looking napkin in my father-in-law’s house. I added some interest to the background.
The one thing which intrigued me in the challenge was Lara Ferroni comment about difficulty to take a horizontal photo. It never bothered me, but I also don’t think I was using the background of my set enough. But I noticed something browsing through my salad images.
It seems that with the higher camera position, my photo looked more interesting. And the reason for it was, that instead of including whaever was far behind my set, I had more space taken by the plate with the salad.
I played a bit with the aperture for the shot, and as much as I liked the shallow depth of field of f/4.8, it seemed like not enough of salad ingredients were in sharp focus. I was between f/6.3 and f/9 (I took images with random increments), and finally went with f/6.3.
I did only basic post processing on it, like clarity and vibrance, I adjusted tines as the image seemed very bright, there is so much white there, and added a bit of sharpening.

Another shot from the garden series. I started from taking several shots of gooseberries on the bush. But I wanted something more “creative”, and more like food then nature shot. The gooseberries were still too hard to eat, as they are still ripening in the June sun, but I got permission to pick some fruit for my photo project. I found this small bowl with green flower pattern on it in the cupboard. At first, I thought it might be too decorative, but then I figured it will match gooseberries green color, and it may actually work. Especially that I chose to use the garden wooden table as a simple backdrop. The biggest problem for me was to make the single berries outside the bowl to look naturally dropped, I completely don’t have the eye for that… But here is the resulting image, with just a bit of my typical post-processing- Clarity, Vibrance and Vignette.

The fruit trees and bushes in my father-in-low garden are ripening already. Quickly, for me, but the truth is it is about time. The summer is here, we had summer solstice last week, and the vacation time in Poland started. I remember picking currants in my grandma’s orchard when we were coming there for summer vacation, and eating fruit straight from the bush. In fact, it was the only way I would eat them- somehow in a bowl you can feel better how sour they are!

My image of strawberries on colander seems to be doing quite well on few of stock agencies I submit images to, so I decided to go with the blow. In Poland, quite different then in US, the fruit are far more seasonal. When a fruit is in season, there are people selling it outside stores, freshly picked from their gardens. Or so I want to think . In any case, right now seems the strawberry season is winding down (and so the prices), but the cherries just showed up. I made similar set and shoot some images.

My father-in-low brought home yesterday a large package of fresh strawberries. Hmmm, what a smell. He washed them on the colander and left to drain. It just looked ready for photographing. I have a small studio set-up – a piece of white paper on the cabinet next to the window- ready for just such occasion. When I was done with standard, sharp all-in-focus shot, I took some with my Lensbaby for fun and for blog.

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.

Another Orton effect. This one was shoot more by accident, when we were photographing pears in downstairs studio. We were trying to get rather shallow depth of field and difference between first and second fruit. Tomasz was manually adjusting the focus, starting from totally unfocused image, which I used as the bottom layer for this “sandwich”.

In food photography (or for that matter in almost any kind of photography) most of the times the difference between great and so so picture is in second plan. Total image experience is built not only by the main role player but also by all those props that are nicely blurred out by bokeh in the background.

The problem is that building nice second plan set can quickly add to quite an expense. In pursuit to save some green (and any other color for that matter) we decided to go and browse through local thrift stores. I was quite surprised actually how many there are. After spending better part of last Saturday shopping we brought home quite a collection of different things we intend to use in our shots. Here is just a sample (wine is ours ):

And here is the best part of it – all those things cost less than gas we burned to drive to all those stores!

Recently I find myself trying more and more different kind of lighting pattern I’d like to learn and trying them at our small studio. During last week all we shoot is food so this time you’ll get a nice apple:

The apple is being lit by one umbrella dressed Speedlight to the right of the camera and another one zoomed out to 85 mm to the back left to produce this nice rim effect on the left. Water droplets just made the effect more pronounced.