Sunday, May 15, 2011

Food Photography...sort of

Well, last week, The Pioneer Woman posted a Link to a free food photography seminar that was going to be this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 10 a.m. Pacific time...I thought, hey that's 1 p.m. I could get the kids down in time to sit in on that class. Imagine my surprise, when I sat down at naptime Friday for what was going to be the start of 3 6 hour sessions. Yeah, so not gonna happen. I tried sitting in on it. But ended up missing most of it, for small but mostly sweet reasons. But I did catch a couple hours over these last couple days.

The person leading was Penny De Los Santos, who is a food photographer for Saveur magazine, but does work for National Geographic on occasion too. Here's what I learned this weekend. She likes to shoot from one of 3 angles, overhead (tricky to get to without a stepladder!), straight side shot, or 3/4. Side shots are best for high things, and overhead gives you more detail of subject.

Here's another thing I learned: My photography gifts don't lie in Food Photography.

She spends so much time prepping and 'making pictures' that the food is no good. I just couldn't do that. She doesn't eat it either. I don't think I could do that. Now, I suppose if I was getting PAID to not eat the food I might be tempted. But the work I do does not involve getting paid.

She had some great advice on the first day about being a photographer. She uses a Canon camera. :) A great beast, with a 24-105mm lens, and some nifty hood on the end. Yesterday she did a shoot on a couple things, with this giant ladder, and it looked like she was zooming in on the food from 5 feet up. Not my thing either. That would kill my back. I watched as she chased some cooks around a little taco cart, but that was tricky too. I did enjoy that she doesn't mess with scoops of crisco instead of ice cream and stuff like that. And she uses natural light. If the food doesn't lend itself to being photographed, she choose something else, a different prop, or add color enhancing foods to it. Hmm...it was interesting, but made me kind of hungry.

Color, light, depth of field, all kinds of interesting factors, that really made me want to crack out my book that Daddy got me for my Study of Photography...which I confess is in hiding. It might be under my bed, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, the first day, she gave an assignment, for us to shoot our food community; people, places, ingredients. Given that we were having an all pajama morning, for us it was just a photo shoot over breakfast.

I call this series: Blueberry bagel breakfast.









Not much fancy, but fun. So I'm not destined to be a food photographer, but that's ok, I like to take pictures of my boys, flowers, and places we visit. Sometimes food is involved in that, and sometimes its not. Meanwhile, my sweet Beast (my camera) took a nasty tumble at the Children's Museum, and is acting on the fritz. Maybe I can go take her to see the camera guys.

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