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Moving a little bit away from my usual business of nature/wildlife subjects, I recently did a food shoot for a local patisserie.

It was a lot of fun, and it looks like I'll get some repeat business from them. Meanwhile, I learnt a bit and will use a couple of different techniques next time. I was restricted somewhat by doing the shoot onsite: working in a studio there's obviously more room for tripods/lights/etc.

Most of the shots I supplied to the customer were fairly "straight" images, with PP restricted to cropping, saturation/etc, and blurring unwanted background areas. But I did give them this variant of one of the images: the shape seemed to me to be crying out for a bit of radial blur...


EOS 20D, ISO 200, 1/80s, 19mm @ f/4
The original of this IS nice and sharp BTW.

Radial blur always makes me feel queasy....

Looks like a damn nice cake though. Did you get any freebies?

What were you using for lighting?

Radial blur always makes me feel queasy....

Looks like a damn nice cake though. Did you get any freebies?

What were you using for lighting?

Raskill for some reason it feels like one of those spirals, hitchcocks vertigo style. Before you posted that I started to get dizzy.

Raskill wrote:Looks like a damn nice cake though. Did you get any freebies?

Yeah, but not too much. Although I'm insulin-dependent diabetic, I do like the sweet stuff (as do the rest of my family, so I had to take some home too)!

What were you using for lighting?

This was in a light tent, with just a 420EX flash held above it to use the top area as a big softbox. I had a few flash problems (I can see more spending coming up!) and had to fall back to using just this one flash for most shots, but it worked quite well.

The light tent certainly gives a nice even light. Feel free to post more pics of cakes. It's the only way I get to enjoy them!!

I love it

Really nice photo Dave, although as Kipper has already said, it tends to make me feel dizzy. Can you post the original and perhaps some of the other shots you took?

My sister runs a cafe and has asked me to take some photos for their menu. I don't have a light box, or any studio lights. Is it possible to take good quality food photos using just available light? Do any of you have any hints/recommendations you can share that would help me?

Thanks

Andrew

A different shot of the same cake:


And a different one:


Andrew, having a light tent makes it easy to get nice diffuse lighting and avoid some of the nasty reflections (although having more than one flash working can help!). It also makes it easy to cut out distracting backgrounds (although I need to be more careful to get a plainer background next time).

These shots were done in a back room of the shop, on a bench beside huge mixers and rollers. We had a procession of dishes being brought down the back for photography (including the odd "Hold on, I'm still finishing the next one" - or words to that effect, in a strong French accent ).
Shooting out the front of the shop was tricky as there were all these pesky customers in the way at the time. Shooting when the customers had gone would have been trickier: most of the stock would have been sold also!

You can do interesting shots without a light tent, but it does make some work easier. Keep your eye on the newspaper magazines: they have the odd bit of food photography in there and you'll see a few styles. But be aware that a lot of that stuff is done with the supplier delivering dishes to the photographer's studio and expecting to only get the crockery back!

DaveB wrote:But be aware that a lot of that stuff is done with the supplier delivering dishes to the photographer's studio and expecting to only get the crockery back!

yup, as it SHOULD be *laughs*

Great work mate, that first shot really does induce more vertigo than half a bottle of absinthe and a rollercoaster though. hehe

Nice work Dave. Thanks for sharing and thanks for the advice. I just hope mine turn out half as good...

Andrew