Think that looks like natural light? Well it’s not. It’s totally fake. This is something that a lot of students struggle with, but once they get it, it will totally change how they see light. This is easy artificial backlighting for your food photos.
I’ve never shared my signature lighting style before. I’ve had photographers pretend they were photo assistants just to get into my studio to see how I’m lighting my food. I’m now sharing this with you for the first time.
The whole point of this style of light, is creating a large, soft, very diffused light source using a wall. The “wall” needs to be white, so if you have a white wall that you can put your table in front of, then that’s prefect. If you don’t have a wall – don’t worry, it’s super easy to create a fake one.
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Creating Your “White Wall”
If you have a blank wall, but it’s a different color, then all you have to do is put something white up in front of your wall. You could use a white sheet, or you can use white seamless paper like this from Savage.
With the white seamless paper, you can just cut a large piece from the roll, and tape it on your wall. If you have two C-stands, you can also hang it from the C-stand arms, like you see to the right. This image shows a 9′ wide seamless but you can use the smaller 4 foot one instead, if you have a smaller set. I was using this wide seamless to hide the very green wall behind it.
You can use painters masking tape to tape up your white paper, or white sheet to your wall if it’s on the smaller side.
If you are photographing something small, then you could also use a 5 in 1 foldable disk instead of seamless paper, and use the white side right behind your set.
You are going to be lighting this white “wall”, and making this your source of light.
Your Lighting Set Up – The Right Way
Even if you are photographing something small, you do need to have some room around your subject to get this effect. You are lighting the back wall – that is it. Then, you are opening up your exposure to have the front, shadow side of your subject properly lit.
If you are using your camera meter, you have to put it on spot meter, and then put that spot right in the middle of your subject.
If you use a general, overall metering setting on your camera, your shot will be way too dark. Your camera doesn’t know that you are backlighting your subject, and will make it a silhouette instead.
The other trick to this style image is to NOT use a shiny surface. My surface is a matte, white laminate. The shiny surface will show a reflection, and will bounce more light around.
Notice in my diagram, I have two cards blocking light near each light head. This is to stop any light bleeding onto the surface from those light heads. It’s all about carving and controlling your light source.
If needed, you can put your cards on the surface as well – just make sure you don’t see them in your frame.
Also, notice that the placement of my food is all the way to the front of the set as far away from the lights as possible. This, is again to make sure that I am not getting any direct light onto my food. The light is only hitting the back wall of the set, nothing else.
When you are doing this set up with artificial lights, your eyes are going to fool you. Your eyes are going to adjust to the brightness of the back wall, and your food will look dark. All you need to do is to make your exposure bright enough to blow out the back wall, and get a nice saturated color on your subject.
The Wrong Way
There are tons of tutorials where people will literally put a light directly behind the set pointing right behind the food, directly into the camera. This is not a good idea. You will get a ton of lens flare because you are pointing your light directly into the camera’s lens. This technique I am showing you is the opposite. We are angling the lights so that the angle of the light is not going to blast the lens directly with light.
The above set up will give you lens flare. Lens flare will make your images washed out, have color loss, and can possibly give you flares of light that you don’t want. There is a creative way to use backlighting lens flare, but usually that’s not for great looking food photos.
You can also use fill cards in the front, if you just can’t get the ratios right on your food. This product shot to the left has a little bottle in the middle of my set. I have cards around the front, and towards the back as well. The front cards are filling in the front of the product with light, and creating soft highlights at the same time.
I cannot emphasize enough that your food needs soft light. I can always pick out images of food that were lit by a photographer who has a product photography background. They use way too much light on the food, and it’s really obvious to the trained eye.
The way of indirectly lightly your food will make beautiful soft light that is emulating natural open shade light from your window.
So, there you have it. A super easy way to backlight your food.
If you liked this post, please share it in Facebook, and for more food photography tips and tricks, check out my ebooks by clicking on the links below.
Andraz
Thanks for all great tips. Thanks for sharing with us
Christina Peters
Thanks for reading the blog Andraz!
Stacey
Thanks so much for sharing this tip! I’m not a food photographer. I just occasionally take photos of what I eat. But I will definitely be trying this out!
Christina Peters
Hi Stacey, glad it helped and thanks for reading the blog!
Kiki Simpson
Thanks for this. I am a very new food blogger who is trying hard to learn as much as possible. SO far I have only used natural light and am trying to learn what I can before I invest in lights. I see you are using 2 light sources for this technique. Is there any way to manipulate it with a single light source? I need to start small! Thanks for all you do!
Christina Peters
Hi Kiki, You can use one light – if you do that though, your drop shadow of what ever is on the table will not be even and will be going and at angle. That may or may not be a bad thing – depends on your shot.
Cathy
Absolutely brilliant! Thank you so much.
Christina Peters
Hi Cathy! Nice to see you here – you are so welcome. Glad it helped.
Amalia Ibarra
I enjoyed the trip to this lighting technique. Thank you soooooo much!!!! There´s nothing like graphics to open our senses. At least mine!
Christina Peters
Hi Amalia! Glad you enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite lighting techniques for food.
kerry
Hello – Thank you for all the generous and awesome tips and advice. I look forward to your emails and have used much of the information found in them. I am primarily a landscape and garden photographer and I think the set up would be perfect for flowers as well. I will try it.
Christina Peters
Hi Kerry! This lighting style is great with floral! I used to shoot a ton of floral for a local store here in LA and used this style with it.
Neil Corke
Thanks for sharing this Christina. As you know, I recently expanded my strobe set and am keen to learn more about artificial lighting.
Christina Peters
You are so welcome Neil! I look forward to seeing your pics with this lighting.
Foodiewife
I’m a beginner photographer, beginner food blogger, “hungry” to improve my shots. This is such valuable and helpful information, as I’m just learning about lighting. I’m going to show this to my husband, to help me set up a small “studio” so I can practice, practice, practice. Thank you!.
Christina Peters
Hi Foodiewife! The small studio sounds great! Once you have a dedicated space, it will inspire you to shoot more often as your set up each time won’t take so long. Happy Shooting!
Beth Miller
This is great info and doesn’t look terribly hard to do. Thank you!
Christina Peters
Hi Beth, it’s not hard once you can see how light bounces and then use that to your advantage. If you get stuck, just post a comment here. Once you see it, it will make sense.
Kevin | Kevin Is Cooking
Fantastic, thanks for this tip Christine. Top notch as usual and those strawberries are so PERFECT.
Christina Peters
Hi Kevin! Glad to help. I can’t take credit for those strawberries – nature does a pretty awesome job all on her own 🙂
Teri Surratt
Thank you for sharing!
Christina Peters
Hi Teri! You are so welcome!
Laura
Oooh, this was super helpful! I never understood sticking the light source directly behind the object you are photographing. Thank you!
Christina Peters
Hi Laura, yeah, there’s sooooooo much bad photography information out there now it just drives me nuts. Even people with huge followings don’t understand the physics of lighting and are just dishing out info sending people down the wrong path. When ever a light is pointing at your lens, you most likely will get lens flare.
Robyn Gleason
Oh my gosh, I love this. It’s exactly what I needed! Thank you, Christina. I love the look of backlit photos and have struggled to figure it out. Can’t wait to get behind my camera!
Christina Peters
Hi Robyn, glad to help. Once you understand how the light works, it’s really quite easy.