This question came up in my Food Photography Club. Any Club member can ask any questions they have in our private user forum. One of my students is painting her office walls and will be using her office for her food photography studio. She was wondering what color her walls should be. Right out of school, I worked for as many photographers as I could in a two year period. I worked for over 35 photographers. Almost every studio I've ever been in had white walls. One food studio had black walls, and one had a medium to light gray color on their walls. Everyone else had white. When I was googling this online I found a bit of a debate going on for what is the best color for photography studio walls. The follow up questions are, what are you shooting and how do you typically like to do your lighting? Obviously, those of us here on the blog are shooting food, and maybe an occasional ...
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How To Clean Your Lens Properly
Here's a little mini post for you. I've been getting questions about this quite a bit recently. This is something that we all need to do, and there is a right and wrong way to clean your lens. Our lenses actually have coatings on them. These coatings help with creating good looking images. The problem though, is that these coatings are quite delicate and need to be handled with great care. NEVER, EVER ATTEMPT TO CLEAN A LENS WITH YOUR SHIRT, WITH A PAPER TOWEL, OR ANYTHING NOT MADE FOR COATED OPTICS!!! You will scratch your lens if you do this. If you wear eye glasses, the same rules apply. It just kills me when I see someone put a dry paper towel on their glasses to clean them. You will get hundreds of tiny scratches in the coatings of your glasses. You need to get a good lens cleaning kit. They are not expensive at all. This is a kit from Amazon that has everything you ...
Dark And Moody Food Photography With Natural Light
Doing dark and moody food photography with natural light is very challenging for a lot of folks. I'll show you how I did this shot and give you some tips on how to do this at home. There are always several challenges using natural light in the first place for any shot. The sun is constantly moving, so your exposure will change as a result of that. Then, if you are in an area like I am near the beach, there will be clouds moving through the sky all day, which will make your color balance shift radically as well. So if you are struggling with just those two things, welcome to the world of natural light shooting. It's just part of the deal I'm afraid. The image above is a composite of three images - not to make it dark and moody, but for the action. I have one shot for the pancakes, one shot for the sugar explosion, and one shot for me holding the sugar sifter. My compositing had ...
How To Learn Food Photography; Stop The Overwhelm
I emailed all of you recently and asked you to tell me what you would like me to write about on the blog. There were several common themes, and I'm excited to write about them all actually. Thank you so much for your feedback. I literally read each and every email from hundreds of you. It took a while, and I wasn't able to respond to all of you, but please know ALL of your emails are now in an excel spread sheet and organized into categories for future posts for me to write about :) Something that many of you are struggling with is feeling overwhelmed. I've been running the Food Photography Club for almost 18 months now, and one of the things that also has come up regularly is the sense of overwhelm when learning food photography, and when starting a food photography business. So I'm going to break this down into two posts, how to handle overwhelm when learning food photography, ...
Shooting Tethered With Capture One Pro
Most of you have heard of shooting tethered with Adobe Lightroom. Any of you that are doing that, also know what a pain it can be with all the stalling and crashing that happens during every single shoot. You actually have an alternative. It's called Capture One Pro. In this post, I'm going to be talking about shooting tethered with Capture One Pro. What is shooting tethered and why it’s so important Shooting tethered is a way of shooting where your camera is hooked up to your computer, and through software, your images show up on your computer monitor within seconds of taking the picture. Shooting tethered will totally change how you shoot, and you will rapidly improve your food photography because you can fix your mistakes on your images as you are shooting. This process also makes image editing much easier and simpler because you are no longer correcting your mistakes later ...
Food Photography Workshop with Food and Prop Styling
Finally! We got our dates sorted out! Announcing our next Food Photography Workshop with Food and Prop Styling this October 6th and 7th. This two day, very hands on workshop intensive will finally get you comfortable with your camera and using natural light for your food photos. The technical instruction is made easy to understand. Not only will you get to learn how to use your camera but you’ll learn several food and prop styling techniques, tips and tricks to make your food look fabulous. The in person workshop is limited to only 16 people so that everyone has a chance to get all the help they need. We will talk about the best ways to use natural light to bring out the best in your food. There will be several food and prop styling demos. This workshop is being filmed with a professional video crew so all attendees get a free copy of the video recording. If you are not able ...
