My First Ever Food Photography Image

It all started when I was about 0 days old. I had my first meal…. oops, wrong blog. Seriously, I never really thought of shooting food or food items until an assignment I was given. I figured it could be easy if I knew how to light it. Fortunately I was given a little warning, and an example. I am going to share how a first timer came up with this shot (there is even a video).

Last night I did my assignment for B&W at Digital Photography School and thought I would try my food assignment today using the box described above. The hardest thing of all was trying to figure out what to shoot. I had to go through a few pages of submissions to get the creative juices flowing. There are some pretty tasty items there.

Of course I had to come up with my OWN idea using MY creative mind. I thought about an old empty Chianti bottle. Using a flash snooted and red filtered, I would shoot into the bottle, since I couldn’t put the light IN the bottle shooting up. I took a test shot of the plain old bottle and decided to try something else. I thought of making some creature out of pieces of candy on a candy landscape, but thought it would be to much work. I thought of some coffee beans on a dish with a scoop, but decided that would be cheezy.

I then thought to myself, “I drink 4 to 8 shots of espresso a day and it is beginning to taste weak to me”. I decided to take one of our black shot glasses and fill it with beans to say, “I had to start drinking straight beans since brewing wasn’t strong enough for me”. I actually used some beans that were so nasty they tasted like they were chard creosote root  or something grilled from a cat box. That’s enough of that! :0)

So I setup my shot on a piece of glass I raided from a picture frame. I also used the backside of the item in the frame, which was black construction paper. I set this on a cork bulletin board, which I set on a box, which I set on a chair. Next, I put my Cheapo lightbox on top of the bulletin board. I covered the hole in the lightbox with a sheet of wax paper. I then set my flash up directly over the hole. I set the flash at 1/4 power and put my kids white sun bonnet over the the flash head. Lastly I positioned the tripod and camera view so that I cropped out any unwanted stuff.  Lastly, I placed a folded peice of printer paper at camera left and right between the camera lens and subject.

CLICK!! What you see is what you get. The second shot with the penny’s was a requirement to prove you shot it AFTER the assignment was given.

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