Bread & co

I am really fascinated by the the dark food photography and I am trying to figure out how to take the photos and later how to edit them in order to resemble at least a little to dark food photography or chiaroscuro.  Below are my attempts at this style of photography :)

Cherry tomatoes

I have used the tomatoes from the above picture, as props, for so many photos...I lost count. I still have them in the fridge, guess they aren't so natural after all, after more than a week in the fridge they still look the same as on the day I bought them and I will probably use them in a few more shots. 

What I want to say is that fruits and vegetables are a really good source of props in photos, but you have to be careful and to use mostly veggie that can be found also in the recipe...you don't want to have bananas next to a bowl of potato soup. 

Hope you like the photos :)

Potatoes & Onions

As I have already mentioned  it before, in another post, most of my food props are from my in-laws' old wooden barn, including this old pot that used to be the dogs feeding bowl. They have no more dogs so I took it home with me to use it as props, oh, and the tree branches in the back are also from their garden :) As a backdrop I have used two aluminium (or are they tin?) sheets, also from their barn. You don't want to know how our car trunk looked while driving back home, I kept thinking what the border police might say, if we have to open the trunk, and they'll see wooden logs, tree branches, old pots and some dirty aluminium sheets. But everything went fine, now I wonder what my neighbors must be thinking, seeing all this old stuff laying around in our storage unit...Anyways...

On the left side I used a foam board in order to reflect some light on the subject, also the light was coming in from the right side. I tried not to make big changes in the post processing of the pic, in Lightroom, I only added some sharpness, reduced the noise and maybe enhanced the colors.

Camera settings of the picture above are:

Exposure: 1/50s at f/2.8

Exposure Mode: Auto

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

ISO: 100

Strawberries on an old baking tray

I have been home for the Easter Holidays and came back with some really good props for my food photography, like this old baking tray, from my mom, and these amazing forks from my in-laws. I have been looking everywhere for this kind of vintage cutlery and I never NEVER would have thought that I will find some really beautiful silverware pieces in my in-laws' old wooden barn.  I did not have much time to go to through all the stuff they have in there, so I am really exited for the next trip home, scavenging for antiques. 

I was going for dark photography and have to say that I am pretty satisfied with the end result. I used the tops from some ikea boxes in order to stop the light reflecting back. The light came from the sides and  the front. I am really new at dark food photography, mostly I shoot on white for my food blog, I have no idea if I am doing it the right way or not, but I like the final picture so I guess I must be doing something Ok :)

I am trying not to use wide aperture so often, it is a habit of mine to blur out everything, it took me a long time to go from f/2.5 (max. aperture of my lens) to lets say f/3.2 -f/4. It is really difficult for me to break this habit, I have been shooting the recipes on my blog for more than 5 years, and I have always tried to blur everything out in order to have a shallow depth of field, ending up with only a small part of the food in focus. So now I am always trying to take a picture using  different aperture settings and decide after the shooting which photo I like better.  

The manual camera settings I used for the pic above are:

Exposure: 1/8s at f/3.2

ISO: 100

Ok, the picture below is shaken. Same old story, I don't have a support for the camera that would enable me to take great pictures top down, and lacking image stabilizer the photos get shaken. I tried to correct it in Lightroom, by sharpening it, but you can still see it's not very clear. Nevertheless I like it, so I post it :)

Click Click Guten Appetit!