Cosima’s World….and some food!

With Home Plus Scotland magazine’s Nov/Dec issue hot off the press I thought I’d post up a few pics from one of the house shoots I have in this issue.  It’s one of my favourite shoots and It’s not so much a house shoot as a showcase for a very talented interior designer and ceramicist called Cosima…and this is her world :)

As you can see by the shot above we ended up with so many nice ‘detail’ shots that the editor Leah wanted to try a montage for the leader page.  I had the chance to design it with her which is always great but it’s always a double-edged sword when working on a design with your own pictures, but I think we’re both really chuffed with how it came out :)

Here’s a few more from the article…

Cosima’s portrait at her desk :)  The house was mostly shot with natural light but I wanted this shot to be quite bright to suit the pinks and blues of the room so I had to use a slightly longer shutter speed to almost blow the windows out (it was quite an overcast, dull and rainy day) and I used a softbox quite high to camera right to fill in the shadows and get the catchlights in Cosima’s eyes.  Really happy with this shot but I wish I’d kept a bit more detail in the desk!

Finally, here’s the food shots from Braehead Food School, well it’s the leader page for the food section…

Hope you liked the pics, as always Home Plus Scotland is always worth picking up :)

Cheers
Ian

A different kind of lighting!

It’s not the usual kind of lighting I’m into but I had the pleasure of shooting a few pictures for The Meadows Lamp Gallery in Marchmont, Edinburgh recently.  It’s such a lovely shop and I could have spent hours in there, but unfortunately I only had about half an hour.

Still I’m really happy with the shots I got and the one above is my fave :)  Here’s a couple of other detail shots…

 
Cheers
Ian :)

Souper reflector!

Haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog recently so I thought I’d put up this post about how I often use a wee reflector for food shots.  The shot above isn’t anything to do with that though, I was just really happy with it :)  I had noticed the reflections of the blinds in the glass partition and I knew I wanted to use them somehow.

I placed a flash with a Honl grid on  just out of the frame camera left pointing at the subject’s face and another bare flash on the floor behind him pointing up.  I did have to clone out a hotspot just above him but other than that there’s minimal pp on this one.  I used my trusty Sigma 150 macro lens which I find is a great lens for portraits!

Anyway, here’s the picture of the soup that we will be most likely running in Home Plus Scotland…

The specular highlight on the soup (the bright reflection on the surface) was deliberately placed to give a visual indicator of the ‘texture’ of the soup.  I used only natural light here as there was a small window camera left and without the reflector the soup looked quite ‘flat’ and not as appetising.  My first attempt with the reflector was this…

The specular highlight just isn’t prominent enough for me and basically looked like an accident, so I angled it to get more of a direct reflection to get this…

For me this was too much and it made the soup look much thicker than it actually was.  So after another adjustment I got the picture I was happy with.  The main reflector I use is just a gold coloured cake board that I bought from Asda for under £1.  They are brilliant because you can get different colours and they are easy to carry around and replace.  I know many studio based food photographers use small mirrors but as I travel about and shoot food on location these cake board things are ideal.

I’m looking to expand my food kit soon by adding more props.  Trip to Ikea beckons I think!  Or if anyone has any tips on cheap props I’m all ears :)

Cheers
Ian

Home Plus Scotland food ‘taster’!

Just another wee ‘taster’ (excuse the pun!) from an upcoming Home Plus Scotland (HPS) magazine feature.  HPS are changing the food pages to make more of a food ‘section’ and so the fantastic chefs at the Braehead Cook School have agreed to help us out with recipes etc.  HPS are going down the route of more seasonal ingredients which is a great idea.  Anyway, had a long but good shoot today and if anyone’s looking for a nice day out or even a present with a difference I can totally recommend the cook school courses (I’ve been on one and plan to go again!).

Here’s a couple more pics from today…

I used mostly natural light today although I was tempted to get out the softbox, but I made do with a small gold reflector which is great for adding a touch of specular light.  For example, I used it just out of the frame on the above shot of the chocolate sauce.  Without it the light on the chocolate looked a bit dull and boring.  It also added a bit of nice highlights to the edge of the slate.  I shot this composition because the chocolate mirrors the slate edge a bit.

Once the feature has run I’ll probably upload a small set to flickr and post a link here for anyone who’s interested.

Cheers
Ian :)

Home Plus Scotland sneak peak!

Just a sneak peak for a house shoot we did for Home Plus Scotland magazine the other day.  It was a lovely house with a lovely owner.  It’s also been styled by an interior designer that we’ve never featured before and it’s always nice to meet new people in the business.  I thought I would post just a few of the ‘detail’ shots as a wee taster for any of the HPS readers that might be tuning in…

I actually didn’t use any lights on this shoot as it was a pretty miserable day outside with loads of cloud and rain.  Luckily there were plenty of large windows to let the light in and the clouds gave me quite a nice soft, even light which is my preferred kind of light for interiors.

The full shoot has some lovely images, particularly the kitchen, so be sure to pick up a copy of Home Plus when it comes out (middle of next month I believe!).

Cheers
Ian

Water drop shots

Had a terrible week and I needed something to take my mind off things, so I thought I’d try some water drop shots.  After about 300 shots I had at least three that I liked.  I quite like the shot above because it’s not clear that the whole cd is under water, and it’s like the music is exploding from within, well at least that’s how I see it.

The other two are…

These are processed way more contrasty than my normal stuff but it' seemed to suit the pics.

Cheers
Ian

Shady shooting!

Just a quick post about shooting outside on bright days. If you’re already into photography then this is old news to you :)  but I thought these images illustrated the point quite nicely so hopefully someone somewhere might find it useful :)

As you can see the above shot was taken on a really bright sunny day.  I wanted to use the hedges to frame Stacey and I wanted the path to be the background but this meant I had to deal with a very harsh sidelight.  I quite often hear people saying that ‘natural’ light is the best light, but that’s not strictly true.  I think what they usually mean is that window light is a nice light.  It’s nice because it’s a large lightsource compared to the subject and so the light hits the subject from wider angles and therefore wraps around the subjects contours giving a very pleasing transition from light to shadow.

If you put someone beside a tiny wee window then it definitely wouldn’t be as nice :)  It’d look a bit like the picture above, because the light would be relatively small and so would be very hard, making a sharp transition from light to shadow.  The same thing is happening above because the sun, while bloody huge, is relatively small because it’s far away.  If it was a cloudy day then the cloud cover acts like a large soft diffuser and gives a much more even light, but on this day the sky was clear blue.

So the solution was to move Stacey back a bit to one of the shadier areas where she wouldn’t be in the direct sunlight…

So while this sorted the high contrast problem we now had Stacey standing in the dark.  So this is where the softbox came in.  Sometimes I can use three or four lights but in this instance one was easily enough.  The softbox made the light a bit bigger and therefore a bit softer for the reasons I mentioned above. For the pic below Leah was standing on her tip toes holding the softbox high and pointing down towards Stacey.

This is the reason you quite often see a photographer using a flash on a sunny day.  It allows you to light on two different levels, one is your background (or anything that’s lit by the ambient light) and the second is your flash.  Of course I was limited by the power of the flash I was using and by my choice of aperture.  I’d ideally liked to have blurred the background a tad more by using a larger aperture but because I wanted to use the flash I was limited to my flash sync shutter speed of 1/250th so I shot this at f4, ISO 200.

Anyway, must also say a bit thanks to Houston House Hotel for letting us use their lovely grounds :)

Cheers
Ian