Last week I had a great opportunity to work on a very interesting project: a food photoshoot for Jante Glen and his Wing City2City Take-Out Restaurant.
Jante has this great idea of very simple and inexpensive Take-Out restaurant with more money spent on the quality of the food instead of workers, the building and silverware. Therefore the photography should be the same: simple, but showing the best of the product for each menu item.
We were lucky to find a great food stylist, Nan McCulloch (www.nanmcculloch.com), she helped us a lot with the whole concept of the shoot, along with the styling for each dish.
This is a half a year old photo-shoot, but I would like to share the outcome here, the post is following this ONE. I was not able to release the details of the shot due to a restriction from a client, and now they seems to be OK with it
Shirley Corriher the one of our most enjoyable customers. This time she showed us how to cook. The previous 4 days photoshot was only about the food, and now we did few portraits in the kitchen as well.
I’ve done it 2 years ago, while playing with Canon Speedlight strobes: that time we did not have much assignments and I spend time in studio exploring new techniques, a lot of resulting photos found a place in our stock collection. Continue reading »
About 30% of studio work I do is for packaging, and I would like to share what I have learned.
Simple tips and rules on how to make product look best on a package. Shooting product for a package sometimes is very similar to a catalog photography, or for a web (except resolution). However, there are few aspects which photographer need to keep in mind during a shoot:
We always had a kitchen in the studio, but was never actually shooting in it. It was mainly used for food preparation and styling, occasional party cooking, etc. When I worked with Shirley Corriher, for a first time (see the result) , we used a kitchen a lot, most of the cakes, biscuits and other sweeties which I do not know how to call, was made in our kitchen.
Atlanta photographer:One of meals prepared in the kitchen for Bakewise book
Do you like a beer? I do, a lot . Recently we met Jason, co-owner of a new Atlanta brewing company called Back Forty Beer Company. This is how we got our new assignment: Beer and packaging shoot of “Naked Pig” ale:
Pouring beer image
The ale is really good, we have enjoyed it’s rich taste after each pouring shoot I especially like their slogan “Get Naked and Enjoy!”
Once again we were playing with water and fruits. Small inflated pool, 3 Canon Speedlite Flash units and some handy support hardware makes it possible. Around 1/10.000 second flash duration can freeze any splash, only you need to worry about is a light distribution: reflectors and white backdrops are must to be here.
I was using canon 180mm Macro lens with f16 aperture to increase DOF, as water was moving berries away from a focus plane during a splash. Berries and fruits were hang on a rails with help of tiny fishing line.
The results are below
A cake from a Whole Foods Grocery, same technique as we have used HERE, except white background. White because it was for a microstock, as they like products on a white. Start feeling that we’ll need to shoot more like this, as these images age quite popular on iStock and Shutterstock.
Some examples oh high-speed photography we did a while ago. I have used 3 Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash units, synchronization was done by hand:-)
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III camera, manual shooting mode, 1/250 sec, F4.5. Shutter speed does not really matter, as actual flash duration was about 1/3000 sec.
Do you like the result? Let me know if you want to see detailed explanation on how it was done. BTW, most images from this photoshot (and similar ones) I have for sale on my mini-stock site: www.akelphoto.com
Update: Waiting for my Paul C Buff Einstein to arrive, will see if they will be capable to do the similar action freeze.
July 19th, 2010 | 
