Food Photography: Lighting

The subject of this post is about using in a simple way the lighting, both natural than artificial, to produce a food shot. I'm using as example an image I shot this week for a recipe on this blog.



The first advice I always give to everyone who's asking me how to improve his food photography is to choose a shot she particularly likes and study it, particularly trying to understand the lighting the photographer used. It's lighting what makes 90% of a shot. Browsing the net you can find a lot of food shots where the food has great styling and the shot has also a decent composition, but the lighting... terrible! This makes the food looking very unappetizing. Which of us would like to eat in a cavern or in a very dark room?

La prima regola - The first rule: KISS

KISS, which is the acronym for "Keep It Simple Stupid", is always the first rule to follow when you want to start to learn how to use lighting. But also when you will be become more expert, don't put it away. It's impressive how great photographers manage to create great shots using the simplest lighting schemes.

Analizziamo la foto d'esempio - Analyzing the example shot



Do you understand then how I used lighting in the example shot? If yes, great, congratulations. Otherway it's just a matter of experience, patience... and of using a little trick: look where the shadows are falling. On the opposite side there's the main light for sure.
In that shot you can see how the shadows are falling in front of the garlic, then the main light (in this case the only light I used, do you remember KISS?) is behind the vegetables.
Why did I put the main light there? Because backlighting, especially in food, exalts the shapes and the tridimensionality of the image, beside that it helps to show the texture of the garlic, which is very nice. A frontal light instead renders the subject "flat" and "dull". Do you remember the result when you use the little flash upon your camera? Here it is.
After having decided where to put the main light we have two other problems. The first one is that our eyes are a lot more sensible to light than film or digital sensor of the camera. So where you see just a darker area, the camera sees BLACK, or very close to.
We have to "open the shadows", as it's called in photographical jargon.
For this task I simply used a cheap white foam panel, placed exactly in front of the subject so that it would reflect the light coming from behind.
The second problem instead is the exposure. Garlic is white and the exposimeter of your camera in a pretty dark scene like this one would overexpose it for sure, because it'd try to get a medium exposition of the whole scene. In this case or you use a manual exposimeter mesuring incident light on the garlic (like I did) or, simpler, use a digital camera (if you're using film) and make some test shots until you find the exposure you like more. I know it seems unprofessional, but hey, it's practical ;)