Post Your Food Photography

Marco..
Not only are the shots beautiful
The Food is Beautiful
..and The Chefs look pretty nice as well.

This series is just tops!

Now I'm definitely hungry! The food looks exquisite!

Superb set macobee!

Thanks everyone..........now where to get some good critique on images, its all nice to hear all these good comments but i still believe theres lots i can improve........but seems on flickr and also here there is not much real critique going on anymore.........anyonj​e know of anywhere I could go to get some more direction?

macobee wrote in post #9676960
Thanks everyone..........now where to get some good critique on images, its all nice to hear all these good comments but i still believe theres lots i can improve........but seems on flickr and also here there is not much real critique going on anymore.........anyonj​e know of anywhere I could go to get some more direction?

Just on this latest set... great job, I like it a lot, but I can provide some critique since you're asking

First off on a couple of them you are cropping the plate a bit too much. Personally I like the shots as shown, but if I were taking these, I would set the framing so that I could get the whole plate in the frame and then crop from there if needed. Of course I imagine that you have many more shots of each subject than you're actually showing us, so you surely have some with the entire plates showing. Again, I do like the crops you have chosen but sometimes you just want to see the whole plate. Also some of them look slightly tilted (e.g. "Tartar" looks like it's leaning to the right). It is a bit disconcerting but easily corrected in post.

I would also go with more than one light if at all possible. It looks like all of these have the same lighting: one decently large source camera left, above and behind the subject. This gives nice reflections on the shiny top surfaces (especially on the "Tartar", but you can see it in all the photos) but it can leave the shadowed surfaces (nearest to the camera) kind of dark. You can see this especially in the "Asparagus" photo. I don't know if this could really be corrected due to the arrangement of the subjects, but the face of the Asparagus thing that's next to the crunchy thing is quite dark. In the "Tartar" photo you have the same problem. The bottom, crunchy-looking piece especially is kind of dark. I would try adding another, smaller light source placed symmetrically to the primary light source (i.e., camera right, behind the subject -- but lower, almost table-level) to give sort of a "kicker light" effect, i.e. a highlight along the right edge of the food. (This might work better for some subjects than for others.) A small white card reflector just out of frame, directly on a line between the camera and the subject, would give good fill for the front face. I would guess that you already have some sort of reflector for fill, or maybe it's just the white plate and tablecloth bouncing light back.... but a bit more would be nice.

Adding another light source would also help with the plate disappearing into the tablecloth effect that you have on a couple of these. It is definitely kind of a cool effect, but I don't know if that's what you were going for. It is a bit distracting if you're trying to keep the focus on the food.

I guess the other thing I would say to do is experiment and move things around a little bit more. All of these shots look pretty much the same. Very good, but the same. The lighting is the same, the angle is the same, the perspective is the same (if I had to guess I would say you were using a short telephoto lens like an 85mm). I would try some different positions and different lenses. On a big dish, try getting in very close with an ultrawide-angle lens (e.g. 17mm full-frame). On subjects with interesting geometry (such as the "Asparagus" and "Jellywork") I think a straight top-down shot could look very interesting... stand up on a chair, hold the camera out over the table, point it down and fire off 3 or 4 shots and see what you get. (Assuming you don't have ladders, etc. available.) The "Tartar" could be interesting with a straight-on shot from the side (camera almost on the table).

Thanks Badger....not fair of me not to give info waht it was for before.
Its for a brochure to announce the team and to hassle for sponsorship etc, so they wanted close up shots of the food rather then plated table settings. I do have a few with whole plates, even with whole tabletop and setting too, but well....they were not asked for.

you are right the tartar is tilted, as well as the 3 small appetizers too, that was chosen to give it a bit more interest, which in hindsight wasnt such a good choice.

with the lights you are spot on, i had fairly little time so resorted to 1 key and 1 reflector for all these, to ensure we get high contrast I chose not to use a fill flash, except for the table top shots i did. I agree it could have benefited form an ever so slight fill flash, perhaps a snooted one?

appreciate your comments about same same looks but they get cut out and go in a same magazine, so didnt want to make everything look way different.....I have a awesome straight down shot of the pork which is great, but with the other dishes it didnt really work well as the filling got lost.

macobee wrote in post #9679102
Thanks Badger....not fair of me not to give info waht it was for before.
Its for a brochure to announce the team and to hassle for sponsorship etc, so they wanted close up shots of the food rather then plated table settings. I do have a few with whole plates, even with whole tabletop and setting too, but well....they were not asked for.

you are right the tartar is tilted, as well as the 3 small appetizers too, that was chosen to give it a bit more interest, which in hindsight wasnt such a good choice.

with the lights you are spot on, i had fairly little time so resorted to 1 key and 1 reflector for all these, to ensure we get high contrast I chose not to use a fill flash, except for the table top shots i did. I agree it could have benefited form an ever so slight fill flash, perhaps a snooted one?

appreciate your comments about same same looks but they get cut out and go in a same magazine, so didnt want to make everything look way different.....I have a awesome straight down shot of the pork which is great, but with the other dishes it didnt really work well as the filling got lost.

Thanks a lot Badgerw.....am slowly finding my way round with this slowly and steady

Hey, your work is fantastic and I love it (not to mention I'm jealous that you get to do so much food photography... the magazine I was shooting for went under, so I haven't shot any food in quite a while). As I said before, I knew that you had more shots that you weren't showing us, so I had to comment on just what was presented. As you said, sometimes you want everything to look the same because of the final presentation format.

As for the fill lighting, I think some cases it's needed more than others. For example, the pork shot looks great as shot. (Of course, we can't see the dark side of the pork due to the crop.) Basically I think it's something that needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

I really like the pork shot from above. I think some of the other above shots might have been interesting as well, but as you said, the inner fillings wouldn't be visible, so you wouldn't choose those shots for the brochure. But still they might look fun.

for some reason everytime i upload or post a pic, it seems to lose a little bit of quality?
my pics dont look half as sharp as most of the others on this thread

kandyredcoi wrote in post #9699589
for some reason everytime i upload or post a pic, it seems to lose a little bit of quality?
my pics dont look half as sharp as most of the others on this thread

It seems as though this pic is hosted on Facebook? FB really degrades your photo quality. Not too surprising though since they are a social site and not a photo site. Supposedly they are the #1 photo hosting service by sheer numbers of photos though. Too bad they are all sucky quality.

ill post some from PhotoBucket

macobee wrote in post #9679102

looks great Marco, Is that carrot shaped as an atomic bomb?? What is the souse? I would guess parsley oil and balsamic reduction? Great styling on asparagus. I liked your set too, and chefs' shot is cool. !!!

I did some food photography for a friend who just opened up a Japanese Restaurant in Brooklyn, NY. He wanted some photos for his website.

The deal was that I would shoot and he would feed me and my wife a full course mean. (Probably worth $200-$250 if you include the booze we drank.)

It was my first time doing food photography. Anyways, thought I would would post in this thread rather than create a new one. C & C absolutely welcomed...actually desired. I have lots to learn!

Lighting setup:

• White table and white foamcore board BG.
  
• Strobe camera left slightly behind and above the food.
  
• 580EX II pointed towards the BG from the right side to blow it out and make it white.
  
• White foamcore board on the right of the food to bring out highlights.
  
• White foamcore board upper left for overhead bounce.
  
• (Yes, I didn't know what I was doing...so I was just winging it. LOL)

For not knowing what you were doing I think you did an awesome job. I'm sure he was happy with it too. The only thing that sticks out to me (I'm no professional) is the dark spot in the bottom right of the last photo

SamHunter wrote in post #9707724
For not knowing what you were doing I think you did an awesome job. I'm sure he was happy with it too. The only thing that sticks out to me (I'm no professional) is the dark spot in the bottom right of the last photo

I have done product shots before so that perhaps helped.

Yeah, I wasn't really sure whether I should have brightened it up or not. I can always do it in Photoshop. That's easy work.

There was a shadow afterall, and my thinking is to not eliminate the shadow completely, but to make them as less harsh as possible.

But I am not too sure what is aesthetically more pleasing...

A couple images from a Food Stylist Workshop I hosted at my studio.

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