This session is moderated by Jan Kabili (J), and the panelists are Bea Peltre (La Tartine Gourmande) and Lara Ferroni (L) (Cook and Eat; Still Life With), foodies and photographers.

Follow up:

Jan Kabili, Moderator: How many of you would describe yourselves as food bloggers. (Many). How many are food photographers? (None). That’s why we’re here…you know as well as I do how important imagery is when you’re talking about something as central and luscious as food. How many people use point and shoot cameras? How many use SLRs (detachable lenses). This will help them. It is as important to style your food shot as to do post-production work.

Bea: I’m self-taught, I have had no photography classes. I switched about a year ago from point and shoot to SLR. I still think I was doing a lot of things with my point and shoot. A SLR helps but it’s not everything. I realized that the questions I received were what camera equipment I owned…the camera is not everything. To get a food photo, you need food styling. How you compose a picture, and I spend a lot of time playing…I want to talk a little bit about workflow. I brought a number of slides to show what I do and how I do it. I’m going to talk about little tricks to enhance composition. There are a lot of pictures, but feel free to stop me. There are different kinds of pictures. We are used to pictures taken from the front or side. What kind of emotion do I want to give to the picture? The food is going to give you clues. What does it mean to me? Is it rustic? Elegant? Outside, inside, with friends, alone? That’s how I decide on my shot. That helps me determine what kind of props and colors. I wanted to emphasize the shape of the apricots in this picture. I used other round things, green and orange to find harmony. I do overhead shots because it brings story and perspective.

This one is the same idea but I played with depths of field. One piece is in more focus than the rest. I used something dark, I put a cup underneath (to make it closer). I used a tripod and remote control. The same thing here with cookies…repeating patterns. I like to play with geometry and shapes in food because I like to emphasize the beauty.

Audience: Do you shoot many shots with depth of field?

B: Yes, that’s the beauty of digital. Here it might look incidental, but I spent lots of time putting those cookies in the background, I spent time getting the spacing of cookies. Crumbs gave life to the picture. This one is a shot taken with the idea that you could be in the room. You might decide you want to focus on the detail of the food. We are always challenged with little things, how to keep it in place. This is not a table, it’s a bench. I put layers of paper, I took clothespins to put them down. Details you didn’t use to see before becomes a problem.

Audience: How many shots do you take before you get one?

B: 50-60.

Audience: Are you buying props for every picture?

B: Yes. I only buy like one plate. I mismatch, you can play.

Audience: Do you always use small plates?

B: No. I used to but not always.

L: You don’t need to make as much food with a small plate. It looks like a normal serving.

B: I was playing with, in this picture, I didn’t like the empty background, you could argue about that. I was not really happy, I cropped one zucchini, I chose green to reflect the color of the zucchini, but I didn’t like it. So I went to this one (white bowl, no cropped zucchini).

Audience: How long after the cooking do you take the picture?

B: I think about how long it takes to cook? Sometimes I don’t cook the food all the way for the colors of the picture, but this dish is fully cooked. I have a bunch of paper and cups, and I’ve decided I’m going to use…I interchange. I do touch up with herbs, I shoot and shoot and that’s it. This one is more like a normal picture. You feel like you’re at the table. Here I wanted to show side by side - detail and overview. Two pictures next to each other, it brings story to the food.

I made a series of eclair here. I was not really happy here. I didn’t have time to do it again. I chose the purple spoon, I changed the spoon, changed the framing, still not happy. Then I changed it totally - it’s horizontal and played with the cups. If I put one down it brings more interest to the picture.

Here I show how you play with raw ingredients. You don’t have to show everything. That’s the food after using those ingredients. I used a fish, took two pictures - shoot one tail and one head. The background is a black tile. It’s natural light. I use a lot of reflectors.

I made a series here, you can always crop later if you want. I put blackberries and sauce, and then go into the details. I wanted to play, I put a coconut in the background…same thing here, strawberries in the background. This curl kept moving all the time (peas). I just move them around until I’m happy with the spacing.

To get these to stay (stack of potatoes), use a toothpick. I have a series, I do a lot with raw ingredients. The cherries and the glass, think about where you can put the food in a non-traditional container. I really wanted to put them in the picture, and I put cherries in them.

Audience: When I try and use glass, it looks too shiny.

B: I put styrofoam reflectors around, I have to do a lot of shots to get here. I wanted to show the freshness of the cheese, I thought of using fresh chives, and a green glass in the background. Another one I played with, narrow field. THis is one where I thought the crumbs were helping. Someone is actually eating the food. The spoon is the same color as the cake. This one again, I didn’t think I needed to show everything. It’s a tea moment.

Audience: Ruth Daniels from Once Upon a Feast. Can you get the same depth of field with a point and shoot?

B: You can but not as much, with the macro setting. Again here, I thought to give more interest to the picture, why don’t I take a bite out of the tart. The shape of the food…this one is again, you can play with the fork, same shot but from the top. Whether you do horizontal shots or vertical shots, brings life to the food. Again two shots, two different angles. The sardine here, underline the stripes of the sardines. Same plate but different backgrounds. The green of the chopsticks taking up the green in the glass. These two pictures work together, because that’s what I had.

Moderator: If you have more questions you can ask later at the end. Lara?

L: My blog is Cook and Eat and another one dedicated to food styling and photography. I started it because some bloggers might learn something, I was a novice. This is the first food photo that every appeared on my blog. On my personal blog when I was working at Microsoft. I had started up a little blog with restaurant reviews, and one day I was home and took a picture of some scones. That’s how I got into it. The rest of these slides are more on dos and don’ts. These aren’t nearly as pretty as Bea’s. Her food tastes even better than it looks. I wanted to talk about techniques. The first shot here, I took to demonstrate, turn off your front flash. Never use flash. It’s starting to look shiny, and greasy. Not delicious, just weird. You lose the texture. You can use a tripod, you can get a tripod for point and shoots. We’re getting light from behind here, filling out the shape, and they look appetizing.

Next photo, same tomatoes. There’s something called white balance. You might think it’s brightness, but it’s not, it’s about color balance and whether each color is actually that color. The tomatoes back here look kind of blue and purple, and they’re not tomatoes. Camera’s aren’t that smart, you have to tell them the conditions you’re shooting in. Most cameras have some way of letting them know what white environment you’re shooting in. If you’re using a point and shoot most don’t let you do that, but read your manual. You can probably choose inside or outside, sunny or shade. You’ll see a difference there, truer color.

“Raw” editing software helps you fix some mistakes after it’s been shot, like when you forget to set the environment. I use “Capture One.” You can correct a lot of stuff, not everything, not blur.

Audience: I did a bunch of photography recently with an SLR and I just want to say out loud and sometimes it looks Tungsten and it’s not its florescent.

L: Different bulbs have different balances.

B: Lots of people take pictures at night, set your light balance to get rid of the orange.

L: Here are some cherries I shot, to show focus. Do you leave your camera on automatic? The first shot, if you shoot with auto focus, something’s going to be in focus. Here the cherry’s in focus, and here it’s the stem. I would suggest understanding what you’re going for. I wanted to quickly show that I’m not doing much fancy…here’s my “studio” (dining room). There’s a window, a piece of styrofoam, a tripod, and a background. You don’t want the light coming from the front or it’ll flatten out.

Audience: The reason you have the bounce, to bounce the light from the window onto the food?

B: Yes.

Audience: I have a one room apartment, an east window and a south one.

L: The south is great. Your “key” light is your brighter light. The secondary light adds to it. One other thing, I brought show and tell, this is cheap from an art supply store. Over my windows I use vellum. It’s sheer, it makes windows frosty, your windows suddenly become a soft box. Parchment would work too, anything that diffuses the light. In this shot, you’ll notice the whole background gets blown out, I didn’t care about the shutters. I blocked the light with another shutter. I like that bright sunshine right back here, so the focus is on the pound cake.

Do people know what depth of field is? (Consensus: yes). It’s how much of the photo is what’s going to be in focus. There are a lot of things that control how large that area is. How far away your subject is a big part of this. When things are farther away you’re going to have a wider depth of field.

I stacked these rolls, and that didn’t look very good. Thinking about how 3D translates into 2D. How do you show space? Vertical, horizontal? What does the food tell you? Sometimes I like the first shot but it doesn’t happen often. Gourmet magazine spends all day to get 5 shots. Don’t always choose the same angle. This was a shoot I was doing, and I got home, I loved this, and realized there was styrofoam in it. I used Photoshop, I used the cloning, took me 50 minutes to take it out.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was the rule of thirds. There’s the tendency to put everything in the center. Sometimes it’s more interesting not to. Sometimes it’s more interesting to put the cherry off center. The rule of thirds, if you can position the subject on the intersection points of tic tac toe board drawn in your imagination over your photos, it’ll give you a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. Thinking about what is behind your food and what color it is changes the photo. Play around with props. They don’t need to be fancy. Do something that you don’t expect - ice cream in wine glasses. Spoons don’t have to be next to bowls. This was a picture that broke the rule of thirds. Don’t always follow the rules.

J: I’m Jan, I have a video training blog. How many people here use Photoshop? You can do what I show you in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The problem people run into is photos that are too dark. If you get a photo that’s too dark, I’m bringing over the layers palate (demonstrates). We can make a second copy, and then do a little trick on the second copy. (Pull down menu demonstration). Use “Screen” in the “Normal” menu, repeat for more lightening. Right click on a PC. istockphoto.com is a great place to get pictures for about $1 a picture. (Screen formula demonstration). Contrast is a problem. This is a graph that describes the tones in the picture. There’s a lot of darkness on the left, and on the other edge there is nothing. These black areas represent the tones. What you want is tones across the range, that’s what the eye wants to see.

L: Some histograms are on some cameras.

J: “New Adjustment Layer” to “Levels” on your drop down, you see the same graph again. To stretch out the missing light tones in the photo, I’m dragging this slider to the right. The tones are now spread across the photo and separated. To fix brightness, drag the gray tab. Those are a couple of things that can fix photos. Questions?

Audience: Do you have stuff to say to those of us who shoot photos of their dinner?

L: Same rules apply. Get as steady as you can. Set your ISO as high as you can, and do your white balance.

B: If I want to bring the colors of vegetables, don’t cook it all the way. You can’t eat it right away, but you have that luxury at home.

L: Most of my food I shoot with lunchtime light.

Audience: I don’t do a lot of food shots, I use lights but I never thought of doing it this way. I have east and north windows. What about doing it outside? I use lights and have a hard time with that.

L: Light from side or back.

B: Reflect, so details show.

L: Any time I use light I diffuse light, otherwise it’s way too harsh. Find a tree that diffuses or get the vellum. If you use a tripod you don’t need to worry about light.

Thank you, we’re out of time!