137. Fotography

I am currently having a fling with food photography.  We're not really cut out for each other, but it's a lot of fun, and who hasn't salivated over a picture of a steak or cupcake?  There's that Domino's commercial out right now about the weird things they do to food to make it look good in photographs.  I'm sure we have no idea.  On a smaller scale there's a handful of tricks of the trade of photographing food to make it look appetizing.

A lot of it is pretty basic.  Use good lighting.  Don't have too much clutter in the picture.  Get in close.  Not too much on the plate.  Have an attractive background/place setting.  It's not something I'm going to spend that much time on, but it's a kinda groovy hobby.  To be able to take a picture of a piece of chocolate cake that makes people say, "Ooooh... I want that."

I first tried my hand at it a couple months ago with a mango in the backyard.  Those pictures weren't really good at all.  Today after I had chopped up a bunch of vegetables to make this "relish" my grandma makes, I decided to try it again.  I left the scraps on the cutting board to add some color to the pictures and make them more interesting.

I think this isn't bad for a second attempt.  If I had it to do over again, I would put the relish in a more interesting bowl.  Or I could leave all the chopped vegetables loose on the cutting board and photograph them in a pile.  I don't like the way the lime came all, with the flesh all blown out and not really detailed at all.  But the pepper looks good.  And there's a lot of color in the bowl, though there's a lot of shadows, too.

I don't normally edit pictures, but I decided to play with this one.  The picture below is what I got after I took the original shot, cropped out the blank space at the top, increased the color saturation, and raised the color temperature a bit.  I suspect this is pretty standard stuff in food photography.  And I suspect they do much more than this.  

Food and fashion photography are actually two places I probably wouldn't mind a lot of editing.  One of the reasons I couldn't be a professional photographer is because I object to editing photographs.  I used to have a real beef about it.  Now I just think "to each their own" and it's not for me.  It's kinda like with film.  Some people write screenplays and hire people to play parts and make movies.  And we all enjoy those movies and the stories they tell us.  Other people prefer to point a camera out at the world and just record what happens, documentary-style.  I'm definitely a documentary photographer.  None of my favorite photographs is posed.  For me, they're the records of this or that great thing that happened, exactly as it was.