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Just one concern, I’ve never shot food dishes before, how would I approach this? I practiced at home to see what sort of lighting would work best with my primary concern being even illumination and elimination of shadows. I started off with a basic flash unit attached to the camera and ended up with dual monolights firing into umbrellas. This is what I settled on to provide my basic goal of even lighting and minimal shadows. It also had the added benefit of showing how serious I was with the shoot to the client (yes, sometimes appearances mean a lot). Food photography is the stuff of studios and serious equipment for the camera, lenses and especially the lighting. The primary goal of everyone involved is to make the food look sumptuous and ready to dig into on a two-dimensional print. It takes much experience and lighting is key. Now this is not a concern for an experienced photographer working out of a big commercial studio able to bring all the resources of the studio to the shoot and light and modify as he or she wishes (along with a professional food handler to assist). I have no studio and minimal lighting equipment. There is no way I could try and replicate the types of shots I see in magazines, thankfully, that was not what the client wanted anyway (who acted as the food handler to ensure it all looked good). From the old menus he gave me to review, I could see that the dishes were isolated and “floating” on a colored background, so even illumination and elimination of shadows, was not a bad approach at all. Given the usage requirements of the restaurant, shooting digitally was the most appropriate method. I used my Nikon D100 with the 35-70mm f2.8 most of the time, but the 18-35mm and 80-200mm lenses were also utilized for some shots. I could have used a wider lens for some general restaurant shots, but the 27mm equivalent I had with the 18-35mm served me well for the most part. My Multiblitz 200 w/s monolights with 36-inch umbrellas were positioned fairly close to the camera, which was mounted on a tripod. We started off with dim sum dishes and then went into main course dinner dishes. Seeing all those dishes made me a bit hungry, especially the crab and lobster dishes, which are a favorite of many. Afterwards, some general shots of the restaurants interior and exterior entrance were taken to round out the coverage. Side note – dim sum are small dishes, usually steamed and then carted around by the restaurant staff all around the restaurant for patrons to order. The dishes run the range of prosaic buns and dumplings to exotic such as spicy chicken feet to shark fin soup (not exactly the most environmentally conscious dish to order nowadays given the shrinking number of sharks in the oceans). In Chinese dim sum is referred to as “drinking tea” but that is not what dim sum means. Tea is highly recommended to cut through some of the more oily dishes in the dim sum menu. I personally do not care for dim sum, preferring the all-American hamburger and fries for my grease intake. The
Shoot I went over the 170 shots taken to select only the best of them to round it down to 60 final images to present to the client for use. It was a great learning experience and I loved being able to work digitally. I checked every shot taken and although people complain about the small LCD sizes on D-SLRs, you can bet that every last one of those complainers would laugh in your face if asked to give it up (or clutch the camera tight to the chest like it was the Maltese Falcon). I would be mortified to try and do this with film and either shoot off dozens of Polaroids to get the exposure right or not know at all until the film was processed. For the digital workflow, I reviewed all the images through NikonView, utilizing magnified views and the slideshow feature to go through the potentials. After isolating the images that looked best, I converted the RAW files to TIFF format through the Bibble conversion software. I could have tweaked the images within Bibble, but I just wanted a basic batch conversion done. Photoshop was then called upon to edit the images and clean them up to look their best with careful consideration for how much sharpening should be applied. Within Photoshop I had a number of plug-ins and actions to call upon including some Fred Miranda actions, the relatively new Photokit group of Automate tools, and Nik Sharpener Pro. For the sharpening, I chose one of the Photokit Luminance Sharpening 2 for some of the shots for its good balance between sharpening the subject while keeping noise in check. However, most of the shots were sharpened with regular Unsharp Masking, but only in the red and green channels and not the more noisy blue. It was quite a thrill to see what looked like a dingy RAW image become a bright and effective image after the editing process. I marveled at the details that were captured by the Nikon D100 under the monolights when I viewed the images at 100% magnification. There is nothing like shooting with monolights to bring out the best in digital capture with rapier sharp images that never seem to be as vivid as when shooting in ambient light conditions. The restaurant owner wanted some small prints made of each dish for rotating through frames to be mounted at the entrance way. I printed them through my Epson 1270 and most of them came out just fine, but the owner did request eight of the shots to be reprinted because they were too dark and not accurate of the actual dish colors, the dark images were not as appetizing looking, which was definitely not what we wanted. When I edited the images for printing, I was going by memory of what the dishes looked like and after coming back home I showed my wife the rejects and she immediately agreed that my prints were indeed too dark. After some quick editing through Photoshop, I had some much better looking images and prints and I must admit that my subjective taste in setting the original images was definitely off. Some of the dishes were not wholly too dark but some elements in the image were not the client’s taste, which had more to do with his initial acceptance of how the dishes looked coming out of the kitchen.
Visit Fortune House Seafood Restaurant's website and see some more images I took. |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Edwin's
Vignettes -
A Small Commercial Shoot
I
recently did what could be called a commercial shoot for a local Chinese
restaurant. The restaurant is a client of my brother-in-law who sets
up networks and provides software and hardware resources to a number
of restaurants in the Vancouver area. He found out the restaurant owner
was looking for a photographer to shoot some updated food dishes for
his menu, website and advertising needs, to which my name came up. A
few e-mails and phone conversation later and I’m in on a Sunday afternoon
to do the shoot.
Three-hours
later, 170 RAW images were taken with two file dumps required to a laptop
in order to reuse the two 512 MB compact flash cards I have. 170 RAW
files is just over 1.5 GB of data and when converted to TIFF, would
be just less than 6 GB of data. If you are interested in getting into
digital photography you better have one or more 
