Shooting Food in the Studio

This has been another busy week in the studio. I would like to share some behind the scenes photos from a food shoot with Uncle Ed’s Gourmet Cookies. This time… no cookies…. We are creating a menu board for some new sandwiches and salads they are introducing.
First and most important rule of shooting food…. have a great food stylist. Many restaurant clients think they have a great chef and that is all they need to create the food images…. Nothing could be further from the truth. Preparing food to eat, and preparing food for photography are two different things. If any of you have been privileged to see photographer Joe Glyda do his presentation on Shooting Food Photography at Photoshop World, you already know all this. Joe has an incredible presentation showing the difference between not using a stylist, and having an expert on the set. Sure makes the photography part a lot easier and the retouching almost nonexistent.

Next part… pick the right background… Keep it simple … don’t let it interfere with the product. For this shoot we are using 4-foot cedar wood planks that have been custom sandblasted to enhance the grooves in the surface. Lighting consists of a 4 foot soft-box backlighting the product, a 1-foot soft-box to the left and behind the food to throw some shape into the product, and a single raw strobe head coming from the same direction with a spot grid focused right on the plate of food. This light is set a very low power, but gives the food an extra sparkle and snap. A white card on the right fills in to balance out the shadows.

Camera choice today is the Canon 1DS Mark III with the 90mm f2.8 Tilt/shift lens (my favorite lens for tabletop shooting with the Canon). The lens is tilted forward to increase the depth of field. A custom white balance is recorded to set the perfect color balance. The camera is tethered to the Mac computer via a USB2 cable and using the Canon Utility software to bring each image into the computer as it is exposed. The stylist and clients can view the composition of the images using the Live View function, which they really love. They don’t crowd around the camera this way and give me some space to work. They can all stand around the workstation and view the live image on a 24-inch monitor to see if they like the image before we fire the camera.

The images are transferred directly into Lightroom as each image comes in for any adjustments. For a more detailed explanation of the tethered process with Lightroom, see my upcoming article in the Lightroom section of the next issue of Photoshop User magazine.
Once the images are photographed, the Raw files are all adjusted as a group in Lightroom and exported as 16-bit tiff files into Photoshop. The files are slightly retouched doing a little clean-up and burning down the background some so they all look consistent with each other. They are then converted to final 8-bit files and burned to CD for client delivery along with a web Gallery site posted on line for everyone else on the photo shoot to view.

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jim@divitalephotography.com