When I saw this image I knew immediately it would have been a possible winner of the B/W Food Photography Contest; it belongs to Kulsum Kunwa of Journey Kitchen, and it's a perfect interpretation of the B/W theme - besides that, the composition is very clever, the lighting is spot on and the contrast is striking  - yet the transition from black to white is very smooth; great work!

Here is Kulsum herself about the creative process behind the shot " To me, black and white was not about taking away color from a colorful picture but to highlight the color black and white itself. So I took a pitch dark black chair and white eggs to start with. The hands are coming down from the back of the chair. They are used to isolate the subject from the background and show natural color sequence of white, grey and black.

The picture is taken with a 50mm lens with natural light (afternoon) coming from 9 0 clock angle. The light was highly diffused with a thick white cloth but I kept a small opening towards the top (which was diffused with a very thin cotton cloth) where the light was directly falling on the eggs. This helped me to keep the background as dark as possible while highlighting the whites of the egg.

And the theme Kulsum chose for the next contest is : " MOVEMENT " - sounds awesome !

As much as it's true that food ( usually ) doesn't move, there's always a series of actions taking place during the preparation and presentation of food ( beating, whisking, slicing, turning, sauteeingâ?¦. eating!).

For this one guys, my advice is camera on a tripod and slow shutter speed; best done in natural light, as flash freezes every action.

The deadline will be monday 8th of August ( midnight your local time ); send your images (only one per person ) to dario@foodpixels.com and please include your full name and a title for your work.

Images should be around 500 x 700 pixels, portrait size or landscape.

Have fun , and be curious - explore some new ideas.

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Posted in black, and, white, Photography

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This picture is titled " Lime & cilantro sorbet " and belongs to Richard Haber.

The composition is pleasant, yet I'd like to zoom out a little, as I feel the glass in the centre is too dominating ( and the very low angle accentuates this feeling ), while there are other items in the frame I also want to look at - especially the cup on the right, which looks so perfect and whose colours are so inviting that I almost want to make it the hero of the shot.

However, what interests me the most is the lighting technique employed by Richard: " this was shot with a 70 - 200mm f/2.8 lens racked all the way in to 200mm.  It was shot at 1/200th (sync speed) at f/14 to hold the focus through the front glass and sorbet.  The glass was about 1.4 meters away, which is about the closest that lens can focus and created the out of focus blur on the rear glasses.

The light was a 1 square meter home made bank light diffused through a calumet stretched across the front. The light was directly behind the set so we were shooting into it and rear lighting the glasses.   A diffuse white fill card was curved across the front of the set and we shot through a hole cut in it.  We added two black cards, one on either side to help the bright field lighting on the front glass stem".

Thanks for that Richard, your lighting is good and I can't fault your technique; but maybe I can help you improve it - this is how: in order to have a perfectly white background and properly exposed sorbets, without losing the edges of your glasses,  you have to light them separately - that is, you need two light sources and some distance between the background and the glasses.

Instead of shooting straight into the light, you can bounce one light off a white wall and use the other one to expose the subject; you still want to backlight the sorbets so to avoid unwanted highlights on the glass - the trick, I guess, is not to have light stands in the way.... if you know what I mean.

Food styling wise, I find the lime is a little hefty; I think a small sprig of  fresh cilantro would have caught the backlight beautifully and lighten up the hero glass.

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Posted in Food, Styling

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The diptych above belongs to Richard Park ; the first thing I noticed when I opened it up on my desktop was the really soft focus - after double checking with the magnifying glass I  was actually able to establish that the image is in fact out of focus; the blur is more obvious in the left image, but also the right one is not perfectly sharp.

I asked Richard if he could share his camera settings and there it came the explanation to the focusing issue:

F-stop ( aperture ): f/2 Shutter: 1/60th sec. ISO: 400. The images were captured on a Canon 5d Mark II using a 50mm and natural window light.

1/60th of a second is not a fast enough shutter speed to hand hold the camera; if you drink a couple of coffees a day ( I drink double that ) chances are that you'll end up with camera shake. In addition to that, f/2 is a big aperture value, which will contribute to a very small depth of field.

Finally, you will have noticed already that smooth surfaces and items ( like the eggs here ) can be difficult to set the focus on.

The best thing to do is to use a tripod, to really be sure to avoid movement; and if you don't have a tripod, you can still tweak the aperture and ISO settings in order to buy yourself a faster shutter speed.

I believe the lens Richard used would have allowed him a max aperture of f/1.8 ( maybe more? ), that is a 1/3 of a stop wider than f/2; by bringing the ISO value to ISO 640 ( that is 2/3 of a stop more sensitive than ISO 400 ) Richard could have achieved a much more reliable shutter speed of 1/125th of a second.

Difficult? not as much as it seems - it's mathematic , and if you are determined to understand how your camera works, this is the key to it.

Food styling wise, the absorbent paper is not very chic, and same for the eggs case; however, for a food photography exercise, eggs are a great subject, so I definitely encourage further experimentation.

From Sydney, Dario Milano.

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Posted in Food, Styling

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