Food pics with a consumer level digital camera

[phaelon56]

I have a long standing interest in photography as a minor hobby and even spent seven years selling cameras back in the dark ages when one had to know how to focus, set the f-stop and set the shutter speed. My trusty old Nikon has seen minimal usage during more recent years as I traveled more and had fewer family pictures to take.

So.... now that the age of the digital camera is upon us, my interest in food and dining has been escalated (thanks to eGullet!) and I'm starting to take plenty of food pics.... I find it challenging.

Apart from the obvious issue of composition, have some of you developed techniques that delivered improved results? I'm not talking about using professional level equipment - just your typical 2 to 4 megapixel consumer grade camera.

My biggest challenge thus far and the one I'm specifically trying to resolve, is the lighting issue. The softness and more natural appearance of pics taken without flash is appealing but I often find that the colors of the food are far more representative when I use the flash. Problem is, the flash often creates issues with hotspots and reflections on the food surface - this being exacerbated by my inclination to use white plates. I do the best I can in Photoshop to tweak the color fo the natural light photos but often I'm unabel to get it to where it should be, especially with pics taken in restaurants where the light is dim.

A piece of tissue as a diffuser, perhaps? Maybe using the fill-flash feature that's intended just to knock out shadows in outdoor shots? Any ideas?

[Ellen Shapiro]

It's possible to take very good photos with a camera such as the Kodak DC4800 3.1 megapixel unit I used to shoot with. I placed at least 50 newspaper and magazine photos that I took with that camera before I moved on to a professional system.

You can't get interesting depth of field effects with a consumer non-SLR camera. And you do face other handicaps. But you can still do a good job.

To address the situation you're describing, your first angle of attack should be to try to secure a source of natural light, e.g., take the plate outside to shoot it or shoot near large windows. You'll probably want to fill in with flash anyway, though. Also try stepping back and zooming in. The farther you get from the plate the less pronounced the flash effects will be. You'll also be able to work at various angles to minimize reflection -- you'll learn quickly what works. I wouldn't suggest a diffuser because most cameras at that level don't have sophisticated TTL flash metering so you'll just wind up with underexposed photos.

Another option, if you want to get a little more serious, is to purchase some hot lights. These are very cheap if you get a basic three-light Smith-Victor or equivalent setup. You don't have to worry about color temperature when you're shooting digitally because you can just white-balance the images during postprocessing.

[Holly Moore]

Perhaps it is due the the type of place where I usually take pics - anything but high cuisine. My lighting secret is to try to get the food into natural sunlight - either from through a window or by hauling the food outside to shoot it. Also, sometimes, if there is enough interior light, I'll just turn off the flash.

I do have one ongoing frustration - light colored food on white plates or paper (ie Crab bisque in a white paper bowl). The whites all seem to blend together. I shoot with either a Canon G5 or a Canon S200 on "Auto" settings" at highest possible resolution.

Edited March 24, 2004 by Holly Moore (log)

[Bicycle Lee]

I personally like taking pictures of food when the food is well-lit by an outside source and the flash is turned off... I find you get a more true representation that way. But I am no photog.

[=Mark]

At the China 46 dinner on Chinese New Year in NJ a couple months ago Jason Perlow had an interesting type setup. It was an SLR type digital camera, and he had a fitting that had a flourescent bulb that wrapped all the way around the lens. Eliminated a lot of the problems with shadows, and was not so bright as to cause disruption in a dark dining room. Pictures can be seen here (scroll about halfway down).

[GordonCooks]

Keep in mind that many digital cameras will automatically adjust for exposure. But, I've seen most of the take a moment or doing it. My biggest problem taking pics has been opening the camera and shooting a pictire without letting the camera adjust natually. I decided to spend an afternoon with my trusty cam manual and discovered a plethora of things I had done wrong and a bunch of adjustments I could have made.

PS I'm an old F2AS guy myself.

[Revallo]

I just bought the new olympus stylus 410 digital camera, is their all-weather digital camera. When I opened it up to take to work with me to take pictures of the food, i noticed it had a 'cuisine' setting. This camera has a automatic setting for taking pictures of food. i almost dropped it when i saw the word CUISINE on the screen of my camera.

[AzRaeL]

i tried everything i could think of. Still got a shelling from my editor for my lousy pictures.

Finally gave up and got a Canon Powershot G5 (it's almost consumer level).

It was worth it.

[phaelon56]

I just bought the new olympus stylus 410 digital camera, is their all-weather digital camera. When I opened it up to take to work with me to take pictures of the food, i noticed it had a 'cuisine' setting. This camera has a automatic setting for taking pictures of food. i almost dropped it when i saw the word CUISINE on the screen of my camera.

The way my mind works.... if I saw the word CUISINE on my camera's menu, I'd think it was telling me that it's time to eat!

I apreciate the tips and I will look at trying the fully manual settings. My Olympus D-520 died and was just replaced with a Canon A70. I often did intentional under or overexposure or bracketin with the Olympus and used the spot meter feature but I hvae yet to break out the owner's manual for the canon (I know.... I know.... RTFM!!!). It does have more options than the Olympus as well as an extra megapixel. I did all the pics on my blog with it this week and it's doing a serviceable job but could be better.

I forgot about the lack of TTL flash metering but that's a good point. As a test I'm usually doing pics both with and without flash and the natural light always wins but with shots like the ones I did at Dinosaur BBQ - can't use anything but flash. When the weather improves and we have more evening light it will be easier but Syracuse has five months of winter with heavy overcast conditions much of that time - natural light is often in short supply or fleeting. I will try backin up a bit and using the flash with a telephoto setting.

Gordon - I'm an old F2A Photomic guy. I ilked the red expsoure indicators on the F2AS for use in low light but gosh they were touchy! I think I even considered purchase of an exposure illuminator for the F2A when I was doing live music pics but decided to just tough it out. I still have the extra non-metered head, three lenses and a few screens but it gathers dust while the digital comes in and out of my shirt pocket.

[Chad]

Keep in mind that many digital cameras will automatically adjust for exposure. But, I've seen most of the take a moment or doing it. My biggest problem taking pics has been opening the camera and shooting a pictire without letting the camera adjust natually. I decided to spend an afternoon with my trusty cam manual and discovered a plethora of things I had done wrong and a bunch of adjustments I could have made.

PS I'm an old F2AS guy myself.

Ooooooh, I have serious case of lust for an F2AS. Quite possibly the best body Nikon ever produced. Ya gotta love a camera you can drive nails with. I generally shoot with a battered old FE, but I'm moving up to an F3 to go with my collection of manual focus prime lenses.

As for digicams, I usually use my Olympus C-4000Z on full manual. That way I know exactly what's going on rather than letting the metering and focus get all cattywampus (technical term) trying to underexpose white food on a white plate or bringing a black coffee mug up to medium gray. I have had some success, however, using the "Portrait" mode to shoot food. You can't throw the background completely out of focus -- even at f/2.8 -- the way you can with an SLR, but you can get pretty close.

If I have time (and patient company) I'll meter off a gray card and use natural light. I haven't figured out how to tone down the fill flash on the Olympus to the point where it doesn't make the food look like it was pasted into the shot.

Chad

[Chad]

It's possible to take very good photos with a camera such as the Kodak DC4800 3.1 megapixel unit I used to shoot with. I placed at least 50 newspaper and magazine photos that I took with that camera before I moved on to a professional system.

Ellen, when are you going to to the Food Photography class for eGCI? I'm really looking forward to that. There are only a couple of books on the subject, both of which are woefully inadequate. And there's this video that looks pretty nifty Photographing Food As Art: Inside the Studio-kitchen of Fred Maroon with Master Chef Jean-Louis Palladin. Know anything about it?

Chad

[Cynthia G]

Ya'll are making me think I oughta play around with food pics, just for my own amusement. Photography is one of the art forms I regularly exhibit and sell, but I haven't really done the food thing at all. I love my digital (instant gratification doncha know!), but would never part with my old beat up slr.

phaelon56, I was raised in the Southern Tier, so I know whereof you speak re the winter gloom. That is one thing I definitely do not miss now that I am living in Santa Fe!

[Chris Cognac]

I just layed down way to much cash for a Cannon Rebel SLR 6.3 megapix...I had used the high end HP point and shoot for the Iron Chef taping and was really pissed that many of the images were blurred and screwed up, so I had to go and buy an SLR...It to Vegas last week for the Pizza Convention and to shoot some food shots for an article...I was pretty pleased with it, although it was my first attempt at a serious food photographing....You can see some of the attempts on my web site and please feel free to give me feedback...i did have problems with lighting...there is a shot of a guy with a martini at the top of the stratosphere...It took many tries to get a good shot and I had to leave the shutter open for almost 10 seconds...but the result was good

[FoodZealot]

phaelon, judging by your blog, you're getting great results. Gorgeous food and pictures! I'm also jealous of the panorama/stitching function you have on the Canon. Anyway, I'm a hack photographer, but I'll offer a few comments for whatever they're worth.

I cut out a square of tracing paper, and I have it taped over my built-in flash all the time (I have a Sony DSC-F717). My camera has an adjustment for low/normal/high flash, and I usually use low, whether for food or people. For my camera, it seems to work out the best.

In restaurants, I don't like to use flash at all, so unless it's well lit, I manually set the ISO to 600 or 800, even though the increased noise is significant. I always take several shots to play the numbers game and get at least one or two usable shots. I've been thinking about doing some guerilla lighting - LED flashlights and such. But now I'll also look into getting a setup like the Perlowes'.

For white balance, I'm still learning how to do it properly on the camera, and I usually end up setting it in the Photoshop Levels adjustment if necessary. BTW, the new Photoshop has an adjustment called Shadow/Highlights that can do some amazing things for low light photos.

I second a vote for an eCGI class by Ellen.

edit: duh - 400, not 600

Edited March 26, 2004 by FoodZealot (log)

[jayt90]

To get genuinely soft yet bright lighting, you need a softbox. This is a tent like affair, with a strobe such as Metz in the centre. It produces a lighting effect like a burst of 'cloudy bright', and the slight soft shadowing is easy to control. The ring light mentioned earlier is easier to use but harsher (it is not flourescent, but a strobe.) A small softlite (say 18"x18") that will accept a flash unit (Metz, Vivitar, Canon, Sunpak, etc) will not be expensive because the unit can be used close to the presentation.

Hot lights such as Smith Victor will work well too, but they bring along newe problems, harder to solve.

[AzRaeL]

way too much flash and the pictures are overexposed, get a Macro ring light or a diffuser if you can afford it :)

[phaelon56]

If I anticiate doing more pics at home, I will likely build a softbox from frosted drafting mylar. My primary interest at the moment is how best to imrove the results of pics taken sans flash in a retaurant under limited lighting. I've gotten some good suggestons - thanks to all!

[fifi]

Old 35mm SLR schlepper here. About 3 years ago I dove into the digital world. One thing that I noticed is that I didn't like the really tiny cameras. I couldn't really get the same "hold" on them. I used to do a lot of macro work and that was important to me. So, from an ergonomic point of view, a normal size camera was important to me. Next consideration was the memory medium. Memory sticks are expensive and that made me tied down to unloading to the computer, which was a locked down corporate system (at the time), and on and on. Then I found the Sony Mavica CD. I didn't get the most expensive one for my first time out so this one is 2.1 mps. But I LOVE it. It records the files to a small CD that can be read on anyones' computer. This comes in really handy if I am taking pictures at someone's house and want to leave them with the disc. One disc (about 25 cents) stores about 150 high resolution pictures and the accompanying e-mail size copies. It has a decent macro mode and the other settings do anything I need to. One of these days I will probably get a more serious digital camera but I really would hate to give up the little CDs. As far as I know, Sony is the only one that has this option.

[Ellen Shapiro]

The reason you can't get good depth-of-field effects with a consumer-level digital camera is that those cameras use very small sensors (CCDs or whatever) to capture images -- much smaller than, say, a 35mm piece of film. That means, at the same aperture, a small-sensor digital camera will give much more depth of field than a 35mm camera (or a digital SLR with a sensor in the range of a 35mm frame). You'll find for the most part that a small digital camera's depth of field at a given F-stop is about 4-5 stops off from a 35mm film camera. In other words F/2.8 on a small digital camera is going to give you the depth of field equivalent of somewhere between F/11 and F/16 on a 35mm film camera.

I'd love to put together an eGCI digital food photography class but the reality is that I'm not a food photographer. It's something I do on the side, because of my relationships with Fat Guy and eGullet, but I don't have formal training in still life photography and therefore don't feel comfortable teaching it on my own. I'd happily do a nature photography class for you all, but that wouldn't be really relevant here. The plan is for me to team up with someone who is better suited to teaching a still-life class with a food emphasis, and for us to do the class together. We've identified such a person among the eGullet membership but he's very busy and it may take awhile before we get the solid block of time together that we'll need. So stay tuned.

[s'kat]

So stay tuned.

I certainly will- thanks, Ellen.

[Ellen Shapiro]

By the way, the gadget the Perlows have mounted on their Nikon 5700 is called a ring-light. Usually these are used in macro photography such as shooting bugs for science experiments or taking close-ups of fingernails at crime scenes. Because of the angle between a top-mounted flash and the lens, as you approach an object a top-mounted flash will begin to illuminate the top and bottom of the frame in a noticeably uneven manner, and once you get too close to an object the lens itself will cast a shadow. So you use a ring light or ring flash. I've never seen one used in food photography before, so perhaps the Perlows can be classified as innovators! I think the ring light is nice if you want to take very clinical close-ups of dishes, and lots of them. You have almost no flexibility with that device, though, so the shots will all look pretty much the same. So it all depends on what you want from your photos.

[phaelon56]

I appreciate the explanation of the depth of field issues with digital cameras- makes sense. I find that with a 128mb card I'm in pretty good shape for storage and the Compact Flash card my new canon is using is can be obtained in 256mb - plenty for me.

I have tried using the telephoto setting as suggest and stepping back a bit but I run into camera movement issues when I do that. Witih my Nikon I could brace myself and shoot at speeds as slow as 1/30 second but rarely able to shoot slower without a tripod. My digital is dropping as slow as 1/8 for shutter speed and still able to deliver clear results. It's really the available light issues under restaurant conditions that I'm struggling wit the most. I think the tissue diffuser and a reduced power flash setting does sound like a good idea.

I suppose the macro ring light (which appears to be what Jason used for the China46 pics) is okat but I don't want to get that close and I also perceive a flatness to the lighting from ringlights that is unappealing to me.

[Jason Perlow]

By the way, the gadget the Perlows have mounted on their Nikon 5700 is called a ring-light. Usually these are used in macro photography such as shooting bugs for science experiments or taking close-ups of fingernails at crime scenes. Because of the angle between a top-mounted flash and the lens, as you approach an object a top-mounted flash will begin to illuminate the top and bottom of the frame in a noticeably uneven manner, and once you get too close to an object the lens itself will cast a shadow. So you use a ring light or ring flash. I've never seen one used in food photography before, so perhaps the Perlows can be classified as innovators! I think the ring light is nice if you want to take very clinical close-ups of dishes, and lots of them. You have almost no flexibility with that device, though, so the shots will all look pretty much the same. So it all depends on what you want from your photos.

I only use it in very poor lighting scenarios in restaurants where I need to take a picture and have no other choice. It still produces better results than the flash on my camera, which when used fairly close up produces a horrible wash out effect, and tends to piss off diners and restaurant management.

At home, I don't use the device at all. I've gotten a lot better at finding well lighted areas to take photos, and I've been taking A LOT MORE shots per subject, so even if I have 75 percent blurry shots for a particular subject I will still have several that look nice.

Here are some recent examples of pics taken at home, in the same well lighted spot on the prep-area peninsula directly beneath a very bright halogen:

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4574.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4579.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4578.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4524.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4150.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4282.jpg

http://images.egullet.com/u2/i4198.jpg

[alacarte]

I'd love to put together an eGCI digital food photography class

That's a great idea, and something I'd be interested in. I hope the plans work out. And hopefully I'll have a digital camera of my own by them!

[fifi]

I've gotten a lot better at finding well lighted areas to take photos, and I've been taking A LOT MORE shots per subject, so even if I have 75 percent blurry shots for a particular subject I will still have several that look nice.

This is one of the issues that finally drove me to digital photography. As I have said, I did a lot of macro photography, mostly nature type stuff. Macro presents some dicey problems. I tend to think of food photography as a sub-species of macro. Trying to get the lighting right to capture the juiciness of that steak is pretty much like trying to get the dew on that liverwort just right. With digital, the cost issues went away. When I think of what I have spent over the years on Kodachrome it makes me shudder. Then there is the Photoshop factor.