Shooting Food

Pot and Stove, originally uploaded by The Written Geek™.

My wife and I have started a new blog, Foodies @ Home and are getting prepped to start our first food post (look for it on Monday!) and I've been practicing shooting food / in the kitchen with my "new" Xti and it is HARD. Food is just one of those things that is really really difficult to get right. I've been shooting in RAW, so I'm getting a little leeway with white-balance. The Xti is so much better equipped to handle WB than the D60 was. There is also a huge difference in the image quality so far, such a higher level of detail. Food is a really difficult subject matter. A poor angle makes it look flat and unappetizing while a little over exposure leaves the food looking down right gross. Finding the right surface to shoot against is also key. I think we'll end up buying new pots just for this project. Even kitchen equipment can be hard to shoot. The picture below took over 2 hours and 75 frames to get "right". The knives were really a challenge, the blades would either reflect too much light back to the camera, or they would pick up the wood tones of the chop-block and disappear into the background. Much experimentation finally brought about this result:



Look for a new post at Foodies@Home later today!