This is a bit different of a post- there is no recipe included here. Instead this is about developing my food photography skills and using writing a blog post to create some accountability.
I received Joanie Simon’s Picture Perfect Food book on food photography last year for Christmas and I have barely read it in the year I’ve had it. She is the creator of The Bite Shot and is a great teacher of food photography. This book is set up as weekly photo challenges to get behind the camera and learn food photography. So I’m going to do something different this year and use this blog to document the photo challenges (and also hopefully post more recipes).
A small disclaimer- I am not the writer/owner of this book so I will not be sharing detailed content from the book, I’ll just share the title of the challenge and some comments on what I experimented with. In the book Joanie suggests we can replicate the set ups in her photos for learning, so I will note where my photos are based on the examples in the book.
I am committing to working my way through the book and sharing my photos with the hope that there is some visible improvement over the course of the year. I am already a few challenges in and I plan to work on 1-3 challenges a week to anticipate that some weeks are busier than others so I know I won’t be able to do 1 exactly every week. I will use some props/fake foods/just dishes from around my house and I will bake for some of the photos. When I do bake I’ll link to my recipes or the other blogger’s recipes that I use or adapt. I’ll come back and update this one post so it will all be in one place for reference.
Challenge 1: Taking Control of the Camera
Jan 1: I wanted to get started right away so I grabbed my photo backdrops and a few items from around the house to set up a basic subject: a mini Bonne Maman Jam jar, a copper colored teaspoon and a wooden plate. This challenge was about adjusting the manual controls of the camera and I tried it out with my iPhone 13 Pro in portrait mode but that doesn’t give any control of shutter speed so I switched to using the Lightroom mobile app which has more camera controls and shot via the app.
ISO 100 f1.5, 1/100
ISO 100, f1.5, 1/640
ISO 100, f1.5, 1/200
Challenge 2: Finding the Right Depth of Field
Jan 1: I wanted to keep going so I grabbed a couple different props to set up a new scene featuring some fake foods! The “pie” is a candle I got from Cracker Barrel- you can look to see if they have it here – this past fall. And the mini cake was crocheted by my very close friend who prepared it in advance of a cake decorating class of a cartoon cake! She showed up to this class I wanted to do for my birthday and presented me with a miniature version of the cake that we were about to decorate! These items may make another appearance as they are always on hand and ready for their close ups!
ISO 100, f1.5, 1/121
ISO 100, f1.8, 1/121
I shot this on my phone in portrait mode but using the settings to adjust the “portrait” effect which is really the aperture so you can adjust how much of the photo is in focus. The iPhone setting makes it easy to shoot and then you can adjust how much blur is in the photo later in the edit mode- because the phone is actually adding the blur digitally not changing the camera’s aperture.
Challenge 3: How to Freeze A Moment in Time
Jan 7: This challenge is all about motion and adjusting shutter speed to capture movement within the frame. I did two set ups to capture different pouring shots: chocolate ganache poured over chocolate chip bread and milk pouring into tea.
The chocolate ganache was pretty tricky to get right- I heated it up to make it thinner to hopefully get a pouring consistency but the pour was not a smooth line, more like a few stringy blobs so I did not get many shots of pretty lines of chocolate.
The milk into tea was easier to pour and I notice a few differences in the shot depending on the shutter speed. At the lower speed 1/100 there is a bit of blur in the milk right above the tea while at the higher speeds you can see a more defined shape of drops connected with a stream, more frozen in place.