Shoutbox

[David Tong]

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Brownies Photo Lighting and Setup
Here’s our second photo consisting of home-made brownies, shot in natural light.



The main challenge of the shot was to make a monotonously-coloured subject, in this case – brown, appear delicious and moist to the viewer. While the whole subject is brown in colour, there are several distinct and subtle variances on the surface of the brownies. The top crust is flaky and crunchy, the spongy middle is a little drier and softer and finally, melted chocolate chunks are mixed into the middle areas as well.

My task was to make sure all three variances are captured in the shot, and to do that, I’ve opted to use natural light instead of flash to maximize the softly-lit, summer afternoon effect that I’m after. Below is the setup shot.



The setup is quite simple actually, but all light sources have to be carefully placed. Both plates are placed on a piece of board wrapped with white sheet of paper
The main light comes from sunlight outside the balcony, the light is indirect so it’s really soft. The light is large enough to create large, even highlights on the crust of the brownies.

The main fill light comes from a flexible white foam board. The purpose of this reflector is to fill in the shadows cast by the sunlight. It also provides a broad, soft light that skims across the spongy center areas of the brownies as well as the shadow under the plates.

A small (purple LOL) mirror was used to reflect bright and hard light on the sides of the brownies facing the camera. The mirror allowed me to see exactly which areas of the brownies are lit, I specifically aimed the mirror to skim off the right-most, three-stack brownies. This mirror allowed me to show the different textures created by drier spongy center and the chunky melted chocolate.

EXIF:
Exposure:0.077 sec (1/13)
Aperture:f/3.2
Focal Length:50 mm
ISO: 100

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[David Tong]

Oatmeal Cookies

Today we have a simple photo of an oatmeal cookie stack. We'll discuss how it was planned and lit using minimal equipment and a lot of soft light.

This photo has been selling well for me, but it's also a very simple shot with minimal fuss for me as the cookies are store-bought and the lighting setup was very simple as well.



An advantage of using store-bought food items, particularly dry goods, is that you can have several "hero" subjects to choose from. You can just open several packs of the same item and pick the best one for the shot. There's a lot less cooking, food prepping, and styling involved, which is good for most beginners and photographers who can't cook.

For the record, those are Marks & Spencer's oatmeal cookies. I love M&S food stuff.

►► Click here to read the entire tutorial. ◄◄

This post has been edited by David Tong on September 01, 2010 10:36 am

[David Tong]

The second image I’ll feature is a simple Korean BBQ dish my wife made for dinner. Everything in the shot is “real”, meaning, the dish is consumable and no stand-ins were used (I’ll mention stand-ins if future photos utilize them).

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Here’s how the shot was set up.

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As the diagram shows, only a single light source was used – a Canon 550EX hooked up to a wireless trigger, firing through a hand-held diffusing scrim (opaque fabric). Fill light was provided by a large foam core board opposite the light source to control contrast in the shadow areas, while a small hand-held mirror was used to add subtle shine for the soup bowl.

The camera was positioned right next to the fill board.

A high, rear-lit angle was used for this setup to create a soft, defining shape for the egg and to bring out the texture of the kimchi rice.

A diffusing scrim was chosen rather than an umbrella because I didn’t want the stems of the umbrella to show on the egg yolk and spoon’s reflection. A soft-box can be used as well but I find a scrim easier to work with.

EXIF – 1/250 @ f/5.6 ISO 250 – lens @ 47mm

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