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We Shoot Blog Of The Day For 12/9/2015

Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

Three Little Words

“Looks like we finally get to work together . . . !   Staying in touch pays off!  I recommended you and it looks like they have chosen you.”

How many times have you been asked, “have you gotten any work through LinkedIn?”  I ask myself that question, and, in searching my memory I find that in the four or so years I’ve connected with people on LinkedIn, I can count the jobs obtained through my connections on one hand.  But then a message comes through my message board like the one above, and it restores my faith in the L/I system.  And as much faith as I have in my expertise as a professional food photographer, booking this shoot may never have happened if it wasn’t for one thing.  “Staying in touch pays off.”  Truer words were never written.

This notification of my getting the shoot was followed by a phone call from the new client saying “welcome aboard!”  And this new client’s welcome was even stronger because they had been told by the connection who recommended me that choosing my company to shoot their food would be the best choice over the other contenders for this job.

What made this shoot even better was the connection who recommended me flew across country for this shoot to oversee the shooting of their client’s – my new client’s – food product.  And an even stronger connection was made.

This is just one example of the LinkedIn connections I have made, and there’s many more like them who will bring work your way.  “How is it done again,” you say?  Three little words.  “Staying in touch.”

Dione Benson

Tags: clients, connections, food photography, linkedin, photo shoot, recommendation, referral, staying in touch
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Everybody’s a food photographer . . . NOT!

Thursday, July 10th, 2014

Like a lot of other people, I go to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other social sites, and I see lots of images of food.  Contacts and colleagues, as well as anonymous strangers, have decided to show what they are about to eat, or have partially eaten.  The explosion of cell phone cameras and other low-cost digital cameras has allowed many people to think of themselves as “Food Photographers.” Anyone today with a heartbeat can take a picture.  I look at some of the food photography online, and there are comments from others on this, like:  “That looks so yummy, I wish I could have some!”  Or, “That looks delicious!”  I look at the images and it is all I can do to keep my last meal down.  What I usually see is not well composed, never styled, improperly lit, and the colors are sickly.  This is akin to those blurry, out of focus  images some people take of their kids and post on Facebook, to the delight of their friends and grandparents who say “Great shot!” The one thing they all have in common was that all the images were created for free, once you factor out the cost of the phone or camera, memory cards, readers, computers, and editing software. As I create food photography professionally, I have decided to see if I could take decent images of food with my cell phone and run it through Photoshop to get decent looking food shots. Now, real commercial food photography takes planning, a good food stylist, lots of lighting and equipment, and photographic experience.  It also takes a tremendous amount of patience.  I have dealt with clients, corporate chefs, tight spaces, and less than ideal shooting conditions.  Sometimes the food looks great but is actually inedible because things are done to it for the purpose of great photography. I went out to a favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner the other night and, as usual, I brought along my iPhone, which actually has a decent camera built-in (for what it is).  It takes 8 megapixel images in .jpg form.  It performs reasonably well in relatively low lighting conditions.  It has a strobe.  But, first, it doesn’t shoot in RAW format. This is important for making better final images.  More megapixels means more information and higher enlargement quality.  Not all megapixels are equal.  There are many cell phones that have larger pixel counts than the iPhone, but the picture quality isn’t as high, as evidenced by the fact that several stock agencies will accept still images and video from iPhones, but not other cell phones.  Image noise becomes a factor when jamming high pixel counts on small sensors. For this reason, a cell phone isn’t what a pro would use.  If you are going to shoot food, in my opinion, a 24mm X 16mm sensor in a DSLR at 10 megapixels that shoots in RAW format would be the minimum to use. So, despite my opinion, I decided to experiment as a pro since I have indeed been paid to photograph food by people in the food biz.  I decided to work with the chips and salsa. The first obstacle is lighting.  In this example, we are away from the outside windows and close to an inside wall. I am shooting hand-held.  So it has to be either the ambient room lighting or the camera flash.  Trying the flash, I get the following image: Although it looks sharp as a small image, there is unacceptable camera movement evident in the full-sized version.  Harsh shadow at the top of the paper.  Loss of light away from the center, and all the color is off.  No styling is evident.  This was just the way the food was delivered.  Yet I see images on FB worse than this with someone saying “yummy” in the comments. I then try the somewhat same shot using room lighting, without the strobe.  See the sample image below:   While in-focus and more appealing color is evident and lighting is more even, the shadows are still way too heavy, caused by non-diffused room lighting.  The position of the camera is dictated by my seating.  I can’t get far enough back to get the chips and salsa in the frame.  The tip of my silverware can be seen at the bottom of the image.  Remember that I am shooting as most people do who post images online, not as a pro.  There will be no styling. Next, I take the image and put it through a little Photoshop massage.  It comes out looking like this: With shadows lightened, color enhanced, top of the image straightened, and the silverware tip removed, it looks better – but still nowhere near professional quality.  Maybe worthy of FB, but not for marketing. I will show you a styled, professional image we did a while back of two taco salads, chips, and the rest of the fixings: As you can see, the color is quite appealing, the image is light and colorful, and the food is crisp and fresh-looking. Shadows are attractive and unobtrusive. The image has been styled by a professional stylist, and a lot of diffused strobe light has been used.  Lighting is off-camera to give highlights where needed and provide depth.  This is professional food photography – the kind supplied by We Shoot.

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: commercial, commercial photographer, commercial photography, food, food photography, Photoshop, retouch, shoot, shooting, weshoot.com
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Video from still photography . . .

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

Slide shows have been around for a long time. How can someone use a still photograph in a video and see it move? One method in digital slide shows is to “pan” a still image – that is, pan across an enlarged still image by starting at one side of a room, for example, and move your “camera” to the other side of the room as though you were scanning the room with your eyes from one side to another. Another way is to see an element in a photo and to “back away” so as to see the whole image. There are many slide show programs out there which will do this. One thing lacking in these images is depth. If I took a still image of a staircase and “panned” it, it would lack depth. If I took a video camera and panned the same staircase, it would look more real because there would be a perceived foreground (the balusters or stair sticks) and background (back wall), actually appearing to have movement between the foreground and background due to “camera” movement.

A still photograph can’t have that movement – or can it? See the video above, and pay attention to the hamburger plate in relation to the background. This image was a still photo taken during a food shoot for a local restaurant chain, and reworked in both Photoshop CS5.1 Extended and Adobe After Effects CS5.5. As you can see, the meal gets bigger while the background stays the same size, blurs, and appears to move slightly to the right. The plate looks like it is coming toward you and away from the background. This gives the illusion of depth and movement. I have seen this technique in some old sepia photos from bygone eras on TV where a famous Wild West character comes out of an old photo toward you and the “camera” “moves” to the right. This adds a dynamic to a still photo making the subject three-dimensional, and gives the photo a video presence.

-Gary Silverstein
We Shoot

Tags: cheeseburger, commercial and advertising food photography, depth, food, food photography, food video, hamburger, movement, photography, realism, still image
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Food Photographers and Food Photography . . . Are you hungry?

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Food photography has been with us . . . well, since there was photography.  But then, there is FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY.  That “It looks so good, I can taste it!” photography.  That “It’s making me hungry photography!”  You know what I am talking about.  Prime examples are the Red Lobster video ads with butter dripping off seafood.  Don’t they make you hungry, even after you just ate?  Now, look at your food images.  Are they the victim of flat lighting  Do they lack color?  Do they make anyone hungry?

Almost everyone has a digital camera.  Some have better digital cameras than others.  Many have a small strobe built into the camera, while others may use a flash unit that fits in a shoe on the camera.  For a commercial pro, that would be the lighting of last resort just to document something.  This is the worst lighting one could use, especially for food.  Any small thing or element that is white or very light gets blown out and loses detail, like sour cream or whipped cream.  If the food image is mostly white or light colored, like vanilla ice cream, the strobe and camera may automatically adjust to make it gray, or a darker color, instead.  Did you ever wonder why the image you tried to take that reflected the flash back displayed as dark or a sickly shade of brown?  That is because the auto-exposure feature of the flash read only the brightest spot in the frame and shut down the strobe before it was able to light the darker areas.  Silverware, other bright metal, and glass have a habit of reflecting very bright hot spots with flat lighting.

Great food photography all has one thing in common: great lighting, which includes positioning the lighting to better enhance the food.  It is critical.  It all starts there.  See Example 1.

Example 1 - Click on image to enlarge.

See how the glistening highlights make this look juicy and delicious?  To make better-looking food images, the main lighting comes from the back, sides, or above to reflect on the food (in this case with a soft box).  Overall ceiling room lights don’t serve this purpose, nor does a flash mounted directly on a camera.  To see examples of what I see as overall room lighting or direct flash lighting for a similar food dish as Example 1, click here .  Of course, the services of a great food styl ist and a lot of post-production work is done in Photoshop to get the color and look found in Example 1.

It is said that a picture is worth a whole lot of words (1000, 10000, or the amount to be determined by the viewer) .  I say that a great food image is worth that many more sales.  If you are selling food, it pays to do a lot more work creating your food images, or you could hire We Shoot.  You can find us at weshoot.com.

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: food, food photographer, food photography, food stylist, http://weshoot.com, photographer, photography, we shoot
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