Mmmm Food!
- gbdrcf05
- May 25, 2021
- 4 min read
Aloha friends and welcome (back) to my website! :)
Today’s post is all about soft lighting food photography! I just want to warn you in advance that I suck at still-life photography, so this isn’t the best, haha.
For starters, I don't have much experience with actual food photography. The closest thing I've got to it is that ‘quick take out your phone and take a quick snapshot and then put your phone away and then eat your food,’ lol. I don't tend to be very observant of my food and I don't tend to try to take really really nice pictures of my food either. I kind of just eat my food without thinking about it.
However, I think there have been some rare times when I have actually cared about what I'm eating and wanted to take a picture of it because maybe it was the first time I'd ever had that food or maybe the first time in a long time I had ever have that food or something like that or it was a special occasion. In those cases, I will try to clear out anything in the background and all use my phone's built-in food photography setting. It basically just makes the photo more vibrant and then it has selective focus as well. But other than that I don't really take food photography very seriously for myself.
So, originally I had actually planned to take pictures of malasadas and I had this whole elaborate plan and I was going to make it look so nice and I was going to try to improve on my food photography… but that didn't really happen. So, instead, I took pictures of some of the pumpkin pie from my sister's birthday. I chose this out of all other foods I could have chosen because I also still wanted to stick with the desert theme.
Because this photo was more last minute I didn't really do any research for inspiration or anything, I kind of just set everything up the way that I thought it should be set up. I knew to grab plates in a bowl and some utensils but that's pretty much all I could use as props or accessories in my photos. I even tried thinking about how specifically I would plate everything, but I'm not very good at that.
An additional thing to consider was the lighting. I purposefully took my pictures during the time of day when the Sun's light is the softest, that way I didn't have to do any altering to artificial light. I also feel that daylight is better than artificial light. so, I guess the only intentional thing with my lighting was making sure that it was the right time of day, which I decided was going to be the blue hour, which is either right before sunrise or right after sunset. blue hour as you may have guessed is the exact opposite of golden hour. During the golden hour, I feel that the sun is so harsh, but during the blue hour, I feel that the sunlight softens up.
Regarding my final photo end results, I think they're okay. I'm not 100% satisfied with the photos that I got. But, they're okay. I feel that where I could improve on if I were to do it again would be the composition of the food and how I laid everything out and also the background and maybe using a tablecloth. There are additional things that I could have used if I had access to at the moment that probably would have made those pictures much better. But yeah overall, my arrangement of food is not the best. And I already struggle with Still Life photography.
After this assignment experience and short lighting unit, I do think that I'll pay more attention to the qualities of light, whether it be hard or soft lighting, the next time I look at food images or the next time I take photos of my meals and post them. On that note, my awareness has definitely changed in the way that now I know the difference between soft-lit food photography and hard-lit food photography, and know why soft lighting is preferable.
I would say my confidence about being able to not only identify the type of lighting but to control and use hard and soft lighting to create hard-edged or muted results on a scale from 1 to 10 would probably be a 6 or a 7. I don't think I'm very confident in still life photography like I mentioned. However, I do feel like I'd be confident using hard and soft lighting for portraiture activity photography or nature photography.
I did learn though, you can use soft lighting with zero money to create effective light for food and for portraits, and for any pictures that you want to take. All you need is something to diffuse/dilute your light source or make sure that you have multiple light sources or something to reflect light. And really, those can be anything. You can diffuse light with Saran Wrap or paper towels. If you have a room with windows on two or more of the walls when you have multiple light sources. Or if you have aluminum foil or a white sheet or a white backdrop or something then you have something to reflect light. It's really simple to create a soft lighting setting. If you haven't tried it yet, then you should.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! If you like what you read/saw, please be sure to check out some of my other posts!
I am honored to be taking you along on my photography journey! I hope you stay safe and have a wonderful day. Much aloha!
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