Week 7

Week 9: Food

Submit Assignment

• Due Mar 13 by 11:59pm
 
• Points 30
 
• Submitting a text entry box or a file upload

Task

Each week, post 6 photos that fit the weekly theme: 3 unedited, and a version of those 3 with edits made in Lightroom or Photoshop.  This week: FOOD! 

Purpose

 (Links to an external site.)

Look at these delicious meals. LOOK AT IT!

 

All of these are for fast food and microwave TV dinners, usually extruded out of plastic bags that were shipped out of Cincinnati like five years ago. It's the lowest quality, least fresh food you can eat! And through the powerful lie within a great photograph, it all looks like a beautiful dream that tastes great and came straight from the farm. 

Criteria for Success

Successfully upload 3 unedited images and 3 Lightroom-edited images. The food should be beautiful. As a MANDATORY part of the shot, include 1 "fresh" ingredient off to the side. I don't care if you opened a 99 cent can of chili. Stick a raw tomato next to it, and maybe a chopped-in-half onion! Put some water flecks on the tomato too!

Rubric

5 points each for 3 edited and 3 unedited photos. 

Knowledge and Skillz

Use these killer moves to shoot your food photos! 

• Isolate the ingredients. You ever seen chili? Once that melange is boiled down, it looks freakin' disgusting brown glop. But BEFORE you stir it up? When the sour cream, cheese, jalapenos, and green onions are all nice and visible? Beauty. Why the heck would you mass produce hamburgers, and leave half an unchopped onion sitting on the counter? Simple. It looks purty and it tells a story about the onion INSIDE the burger. Why the heck would you have your hamburger buns all baked and assembled, but still leave a rustic bag of flour sitting out on the counter? It tells you a lie about what's INSIDE the bun. Mise en place bowls are great for photography, even if it's just a pinch of salt set aside. 
• Look for color. In painting there is "mud mixing", where every additional ingredient mixed in just goes back into gray and brown.That tomato will never look redder than before it's chopped!
• LIGHTING! Shoot pics BEFORE 5 PM, because after that you'll lose your chance for nice backlit window lighting. You can expose longer, so turn make that north facing window light shine by turning the damn kitchen lights off! Especially if it's the hideousness of incandescent bulbs. If it's night, maybe try making a nice soft box. Add in some extra bounce from a white sheet, tin foil, etc. Look for "drawn" specular highlights.
• Overexpose. Just like with faces, your camera will lie to you, and make that blue sky blue while accidentally making your fresh bread loaf an unsightly shadow mass. And heck, since that food isn't going to move, why not try shooting an HDR of it on a tripod? 
• Chimp. Always chimp.
• Material properties are awesome! Wanna make that totally fictitious tomato really shine? Spritz it with water so it has shiny water droplets. Fresh baked bread? Rub some butter on it, not for taste, but just to add a sheen. Fresh baked rolls not so fresh? Pop it in the microwave to make it steam, and get that steam lit with a wall backdrop and it'll look REALLY fresh. 
• Orthographic shots. What does that mean? Shoot it directly from the side, or directly above. Good examples above include the Lean Cuisine example and the Nutrition Facts hamburger. This lets you assemble food with purely abstract principles of design. If you shoot that turkey from the direct left, rather than at 3/4 while hovering over it, it'll gain a sense of epicness and blue-printness. 
• Shallow depth of field. Set your camera to the lowest F stop you can, and have a long distance behind it (looking out the window, down the hall to the living room, etc.) With your food in focus and everything else blurring into nothing, it'll feel like you took that turkey leg to the prom.  

Example project

Look at the examples above!