What are some good lighting techniques for food photography?
August 3rd, 2010 by admin
I’m going to try and have some fun with food photography. What are some good lighting techniques?
A couple large (4×8) soft boxes and two or three fills with scrims and snoots. Use the fills with snoots to shoot through scrims for tight spots, that helps control specular highlights It’s hard to fill in tiny overlaps and keep shadows soft, and you’re also dealing with semitransparent foods that get blown out. Light your background separately. It’s a lot like macro but with the luxury of having room to work.
Ahh, almost forgot…. attitude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afNIRFCiKEo
Posted in photography techniques
August 3rd, 2010 at 7:57 am
Light them the same way you would a model, key light, fill light and some small back light.
This is the most simple way to do it.
Some of the most well paid food photographers can use twenty or more light sources and many shoot inside a walk in cooler
References :
proFotog
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:29 am
A couple large (4×8) soft boxes and two or three fills with scrims and snoots. Use the fills with snoots to shoot through scrims for tight spots, that helps control specular highlights It’s hard to fill in tiny overlaps and keep shadows soft, and you’re also dealing with semitransparent foods that get blown out. Light your background separately. It’s a lot like macro but with the luxury of having room to work.
Ahh, almost forgot…. attitude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afNIRFCiKEo
References :
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:54 am
I generally use a softbox high and off to the side behind the food as a fill light, typically gelled with CTB (color correction blue) or 1/2 CTB. The mainlight I generally use is CTO-warmed strobe with grid spot attachment. On occasion I use a "cookie-cutter" or "gobo" to produce small diffuse areas of shadow and light. Off set, and depending on the subject matter, I might use tiny penlight spotlights gelled with red, orange, green, violet, blue… just about any saturated color. These are generally caught in the reflective surfaces of the plate(s) and cutlery, and add just a slight touch of sparkle to the image.
Finding interesting angles and backgrounds is a challenging undertaking, but it could land you some work in an editorial-photography capacity. Be as creative as you can, create unusual relationships within the image, and you will go far with this.
Entire volumes have been written about this sort of thing, though. If I were to recommend a book, it would be Steve Bavister’s "Lighting: For Food and Drink Photography"
I hope this helps! Good luck!
Darin
References :
33 years of photography experience, 21 of them professionally.