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Food photographer Edward Cownas shares some of his food photography ideas. You can get some of the lighting as you watch the flick. Watching the flick also helps understand the complexity that is involved in food photography production.
Edward strikes me as the DIY guy (I could swear I saw him with scissors making a diffuser at one point. Warning – This video is not for people on diet. It was reported to kill five diets already and no solution is seen on sight. (More after the flick)
Did you know that shadows can work for you? In my recent article I described eight ways that you can use to enhance your photo. In that article I described 8 situations where you as a photographer can gain from the presence of shadows.
Now, it’s time to pay the debt I left at the end of the article and talk a bit about where you can find shadows. (A Valentine for my Wife by Ella’s Dad)
The shadow assignment pictures are starting to pour in – you are doing a great job. If you want your image to appear on the search tag it with DIYP and shadow. You can see the great work already coming in on this link.
Before we talk about where to find shadows, it is important that we discuss about the nature of shadows and where they are coming from.
Shadows are not an “is” but an “is not”. They are not light, but lack there of. If a light source is projecting light onto a surface you will get a nice lighted surface. If for some reason this light is obstructed – TADAM! Shadow it is. So far for kinder garden stuff. And now, on with photography and lighting stuff.
Usually on this site I describe ways to deal with shadows in pictures. This is because shadows can distract the viewer from the main subject. Shadows also often create high contrast that gives the sensor some hard time. In past articles I’ve shown how to eliminate the shadows, minimize them, diffuse them and even bounce to get rid of them.
But what if? What if there was a way to turn the shadow into a friend, to make the shadow so distracting, it will become the subject itself?
In this article I’ve decided to face the enemy and make it a friend. Here are eight ways to get a great shadow picture:
Brian Shaler from the Brian Shaler Blog has posted a great flick with his panning technique.
Thought you new everything about panning? Think again! Brian brings us the “reverse panning” where the camera moves and the subject stays still.
Little more than half a year ago, I published a guide to create your own bokeh. This guide provides a simple technique to shape the bokeh of the unfocused elements in your picture.
Here are the best 6 pictures that employed this technique, courtesy of DIYPhotography readers. I was glad to find creativity both in the shapes used (guess what? Hearts wins the jackpot) and the creativity using this technique.
Last week I have talked about an important aspect of any picture – contrast. It was only natural to follow up with an article about low key and high lighting as both are tightly related to contrast.
After covering the definitions and some samples of High Key and Low key images, it is time to show some setups that will enable you to take High Key and Low Key pictures. I’ll start with Low Key images today and will follow soon with some High Key setups.
After discussing contrast at a very top level view, I would like to introduce two twins, closely related to contrast – High Key and Low Key.
Both High Key images and Low Key images make an intensive use of contrast, but in a very different way. When approaching a shoot of a dramatic portrait, the decision of making it a High Key, Low Key or “just” a regular image has great impact about the mood that this picture will convey. While High Key images are considered happy and will show your subject as a tooth-paste poster; Low Key portraits are dramatic and convey a lot of atmosphere and tension. Let’s explore those two dramatic lighting alternatives.
In the last few weeks I’ve covered the basic exposure controls like aperture and shutter speed. I’ve also discussed the concept of depth of field as an important aspect of the subject in a picture. Continuing with the Back to Basics series, it is time to explore another important aspect of the picture – contrast. Contrast is the difference in tone in your picture. Specifically the difference between the brightest colors in the pictures (called highlights) to the darkest colors in the picture (called shadows). Usually talking about contrast goes hand in hand with talking about hard light and soft light.
After discussing exposure in great detail, I would like to turn to a different kind of control – Depth Of Field (A.K.A. DOF). OK. Don’t jump – you are right. Depth Of Field is not a real control, but more of a result of how you used the aperture control.
In simple words Depth of field is the term you use to describe what is inside the focused area of your image and what is left outside of the focused area (and will stay home alone, and eat dry bread and drink stale water. Sorry Jewish mom syndrome…)
As I said before the control that has the most impact on depth of field is aperture. Bigger apertures tend to provide shallower depth of field. That means that if you open a wide aperture (say f/1.8) you will have a narrow location in your image which is focused. If you set your aperture to a small value, say f/22, you will have a huge focused area. The other two controls you can employ to control depth of field are Zoom focal length and camera to object distance.
After talking so much about exposure and the controls you can use to, em.. well… control it, I thought I’d bring up some info that can help bring all the control info together.
As a solid base for demonstration, I chose to display and discuss a bit about a rule know as the “Sunny Day 16” rule. I guess that this rule is known to film photographers, and is of little use nowadays when all the cameras have built in light meters. But we can explore this rule and learn something about exposure from it.
The rule is simple: on a sunny day, set your aperture to f/16 and set your shutter speed to be as close to the ISO setting as possible. (There! All the three exposure controls in one coherent sentence. Pat on the back!). This is where this rule got its name – Sunny day 16. Image by Stefan Mendelsohn.
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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