In my last post, I talked about what white balance is and how crucial it is. In this post, I am going to go over each white balance setting, what they mean, and when to use each one. All professional DSLR cameras have these settings. Some of the consumer models won’t have all these settings, or with some cameras, if you are in certain shooting modes, the cameras will not let you change your … [Read more...]
What is White Balance, Color Temperature, and Kelvin?
One of the most important but less understood camera settings is the White Balance, also known as color temperature, or color balance. White Balance is extremely important for our images. The purpose of the White Balance setting in the camera is to tell the camera what kind of light you are using, or what light is in your scene. Different types of light actually have very different … [Read more...]
What Is An F-Stop and Why Is It So Important And How To Use It
To a lot of students starting out, F‐stops are very mysterious and take a little bit of time to understand. So what is an F-stop? The F-Stop controls two things. First is how much light is allowed to enter the lens to take your picture - your exposure. The second thing it controls is your Depth of Field. #1 – Using F-stop for exposure The F‐Stop is the actual opening of the lens. The aperture … [Read more...]
How To Focus Your Camera Using Focusing Points
Even with our fancy new digital cameras, sometimes getting the image in focus where we want it to be is a challenge. In this post, we'll talk about how to focus your camera using focusing points. What is a focusing point? The image above is from a Canon camera. Those squares represent the 9 focusing points that camera has to choose from. The camera controls how many focus points are possible to … [Read more...]
Food Photography Q and A on FB Live Oct 29th 2016
In this first video I cover 30 questions from folks all around the world. I cover equipment, lighting, white balance, restaurant photography, how to get work and what to charge, shooting outside, focus issues, using utensils in our shots, food styling resources, and so much more! In the very beginning the sound was a little choppy. Don't worry, it's only in the beginning :) It's a FB Live … [Read more...]
What is the Difference Between RAW and JPEG Files?
How many of you are still trying to figure out what this whole RAW file thing is about? How many of you have no idea what I’m talking about and think that you've been fine this whole time shooting JPEGS and that this doesn't apply to you? Well guess what? You’re the ones that need to read this the most. In this post I will explain what the difference between RAW and JPEG files, how to use RAW … [Read more...]
How to Properly Use Jpeg Files for Your Blog
How many of you are still shooting in JPEG file format for your food photos? Most food bloggers that I meet are. That’s ok, for now. There is a better way to shoot (future post), but for now I will discuss the best practices for shooting and using JPEG files that I bet you are not doing. If you are starting out or have a less expensive camera, chances are the only file option for you to shoot … [Read more...]
Why Are My Images Out of Focus???
Look familiar? Happens all the time. You take a bunch of shots, they look great on your tiny, tiny, camera LCD, get home, download the images, and whammo, a ton of images out of focus. I always shoot with my camera's lens set to Auto Focus. I have always had a hard time focusing the lens manually because my eye balls just aren't as good as most. They really did call me "four eyes" in 3rd grade. … [Read more...]
How to guarantee the best exposure
Learn how to see exposures I see a lot of blogs with pictures of their food that are too dark. Learning how to get the perfect exposure takes time. After a while you will start to see the difference in images when they are too dark or too light, you'll just know by looking at them. Look at food magazines - my FAVORITE is Donna Hay. You can see a few teaser pages of each magazine online for … [Read more...]
Camera modes – what do they mean? AV, TV, P, etc.
There's many food bloggers out there who always shoot in one of the "automatic" camera modes. I get told this in class all the time. I'm going to break down each of the modes here so you can understand what the camera is doing in each one. Different cameras might not have all these modes you see here and other cameras might have a few extra ones as well. If you see other icons for other modes … [Read more...]
Why You Might Need To Adjust Your Camera’s LCD and How
To get the right exposure you have to learn to interpret your camera's LCD. Your camera's LCD is not going to look exactly like your monitor when viewing the same image. In fact some camera LCD's are shockingly different from what your digital file will look like. The image above is of the set of one of our students, Patrick Evans-Hylton. He has a point and shoot camera and it did a pretty good … [Read more...]
When to change your ISO setting for exposure
By now hopefully you've seen the post talking about ISO. Its important to always shoot with the ISO at the lowest setting (usually 100) in order to keep the data in your image as clean as can been (with as little digital noise as possible). When you shoot using a tripod you will almost always be able to set your ISO at the lowest setting. However when you are hand holding (which I know you … [Read more...]
The Relationship Between F-Stop and Shutter Speed
Now that we have gone over the three crucial camera settings used to achieve the proper exposure, f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO, we need to talk about how they work together. To start I'm only going to address f-stops and shutter speeds first. I will address the third component ISO in another post The f-stop, shutter speed and ISO are completely tied together for exposure. When I'm … [Read more...]
What is ISO and How It Works
ISO is the third setting that you need to know about in order to get a correct exposure. I've already addressed the other two - f-stop and shutter speed in these posts. As I've mentioned before the perfect exposure is a combination of these three settings, f-stop, shutter speed and ISO. ISO stands for International Standards Organization. In a nutshell the setting choices for ISO (50, 100, 200, … [Read more...]
What is Shutter Speed and How Does It Work?
Getting the perfect exposure is challenging for most students who take my classes. Often they are setting their camera to one of the "auto" exposure camera settings (AV, TV, Program, Fully Auto, etc) and just crossing their fingers that this setting works in getting them a good exposure. I want you to be able to control your camera and understand how it works to properly expose your images. The … [Read more...]