I must confess that I’m no expert in the field of food photography. But now my wife decided to start her own blog on cooking and recipes (I recommend a visit to www.ellenvanhouten.nl), it goes without saying there’s a need for some images of her creations. Yesterday evening I watched her taking some pictures of things she made with her point-and-shoot camera. With available (tungsten) light. The results were, at least, disappointing. Of the pictures, that is. Not of her cooking! Anyway, I felt I could do a better job and brought one of my strobes and my DSLR to the kitchen. Given the fact I have no experience with this type of photography, I’m not disappointed with the results. But I also see room for improvement. Because I was too lazy to bring two stobes to the kitchen, I took the pictures with just one light source with a softbox. Resulting in images that were, to my interpretation at least, just a tiny bit overexposed at beginning. I was able to correct this in the post-processing step (the U-Point technology in Capture NX2 is ideal for this purpose). You can judge for youself.
On the image on the left I used a small reflector to lighten up the shadow of the plate a bit. I know, next time I’ll use a proper strobe.
But again, since these are my first steps into this kind of photography, I’m relatively satisfied with the overall results. We decided however that on future occasions, we will setup something in the studio and bring the food over from the kitchen. Wondering how this is going to work out for deserts with ice-cream in them…
If you’re interested in the food instead of the photography, you’re at the wrong blog. Go and visit www.ellenvanhouten.nl for the recipes. Enjoy!