10 things to shoot, edit or create this month, including small-scale movie sets, colourful cars and kestrels

1 | STILL LIFE

Glorious food

Create appetising images with a basic camera setup. Bea Lubas shows you how

 

Bea Lubas

P

icture this: you walk into your favourite bakery to buy a sandwich. Enticing scents fill the space. Your eyes move from one colour and shape to another. You can hear the crunch of freshly baked bread being sliced, and as you take the sandwich in your hand, you feel its texture. And then there’s the taste… that incredible taste!

Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and so is great food photography. But there is no sound, smell, touch or taste in a photo to support your message, so you need to get to your viewer’s tastebuds through their eyes. You do this by drawing attention to visual details in your images to wake up their imagination. Your viewer is not there with you, so you’ve got to show them what you see, what you experience, what’s important, and what they should know about the dish you are photographing. It’s like taking your viewer by the hand and saying, “Here, look at this! This is what I love the most about this dish, what inspires me about this ingredient, what excites me about the preparation process.”

A good food photograph makes you feel something. It brings back memories and puts a smile on your face. It makes you want to jump into the kitchen and cook. It awakens that “I want to eat it right now!” feeling.

A good photo inspires. It draws you in. It grabs your attention, leads your eye around the frame and encourages you to explore more. A good photo surprises. It lets you see something in a way you’ve never seen before.

And the magic ingredient that adds something special to your images? That’s you and the way you see. 

www.instagram.com/bealubas

 Shooting the cover image for a book

Let’s take a look at how I created the cover image for my book Howto Photograph Food. On page 95 of the book, you can read all about how I made sure that the hero of this story didn’t get lost in a busy composition.

1

The test shot

Here is the test shot. As you can see, I tried out some different backgrounds before making my final decision. I chose the lighter blue as it highlighted the cake beautifully. I tested the light, too, and spotted right away that I had a problem to tackle. Notice how bright the left side of the frame was, and how dark and shadowy the right side appears in the photograph. You can read more about distance from the light source and how it affects our images on page 49 of Howto Photograph Food, but here’s how I solved this lighting issue…

2

 Fixing the shot

How did I make this image work? First, I moved about one metre away from the window to reduce the contrast between highlights and shadows, and to make the light in the frame more even. The shadows were longer but also paler than when the table was right next to the window. I placed a small reflector close to the scene to brighten the right side of the cake. I used a shallow depth of field to add depth to this photograph. And finally, I chose a cooler white balance to achieve a fresh feel and to add crispness to the colours.

3

 Analysing the image

The flowers are the tallest element in this picture, but by keeping them out of focus and behind the main subject, they lose their significance. They would be much more distracting if they were next to the cake and in focus.

Using a glass vase was a great move too, as the material makes the prop feel lighter, making the cake the heaviest – therefore the most important – part of the image. Additionally, the cake’s warm colours contrast with the rest of the scene, ensuring that the viewer will notice it right away.

 2 | NATURE

Same spaces

Jeremy Fennell works to find new shots in the same area during lockdown