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

ps… fashion!

 

I’ve been so busy processing wedding images last week that I’ve not really had time to update this blog for a bit so I thought I’d put up a wee post about a great fashion shoot we did on Monday. 

It was for a new ‘lifestyle’ supplement to go with Home Plus Scotland magazine called ‘ps…’  It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this and we didn’t want to go down the route of just requesting PR images because you see the same images floating around other publications so we decided to go and do our own shoots. 

However, the organising that goes into something like this is incredible and as we are producing Home Plus at the same time (as well as a few other mags!!) and because a couple of larger clothes chains let us down (you know who you are) we had to scale our plans back a bit.  BUT, Leah did an amazing job of sourcing some really beautiful clothes and I think we have some fantastic images. 

Have to say a huge thanks also to our model Stacey who was just brilliant, very natural and had so many different looks and poses she was so easy to work with (book her for your shoots now!"),  and to Jade our make-up artist who gave us some really beautiful looks to compliment the clothes, to Leah who was an excellent stylist and to Duncan, who owns the studio and also help out with lighting…(ahem)

For the studio lighting we used a grey seamless paper background, one softbox camera right as the key light and one softbox behind Stacey feathered off to the edge of the background to give a bit of a gradient effect.  We also had a slaved light underneath the key light through a brolly to get more light onto Stacey’s legs to show the tights and shoes up a bit more.

I was also shooting tethered to my laptop so everyone could see the images as they were shot, and looking at the laptop screen is such an improvement on looking at the back of the camera, it makes it easier to see how the lighting etc is working.

For the outdoors lighting I used one flash only through a 60x60 softbox, handheld by Leah.  It was such a bright day that we had to find some shade.  Going to post an example of using shade in another post :)

I don’t want to post loads of pics before the magazine comes out so I’ll only post two more which just so happen to be two of my faves (apart from the shot above of course!)

I love these shots, the one directly above was actually an outtake as I was taking ‘walking’ pictures and for some reason totally missed my framing on the last shot.  It’s not a great shot to show off the clothes but I still love it for Stacey’s expression, and the framing of the leaves just seems to work.  Although, I have to admit the leaves were quite a bit greener than they are here, I changed the green to a more autumnal colour to match the clothes, and the fact that this ‘ps…’ will be the Autumn/Winter edition :)  Anyway, this one might make a nice cover!

Really enjoyed this shoot and I think I’ll definitely look into doing some more fashion work.

Look out for ‘ps…’’ around Scotland as a free pick-up A5 mag end of next month, after that it’ll be bagged up with the next edition of HPS!

Cheers
Ian :)

Home Plus Scotland

We received Home Plus Scotland back from the printers today.  Our last couple of issues had a few colour problems so we were using a new printers.  You never quite know what you’re going to get back the first time but we were really impressed with the colour, clarity and sharpness of it.  I’m particularly chuffed because I had the cover this issue and a couple of house shoots, and also a wee feature on my blog, and it’s all come out looking fantastic.  If you’re passing a newsagents or a WH Smith you should definitely pick up a copy. 

I really think the magazine is going from strength to strength and it’s just looking so good now, very fresh design and a good balance between interesting features and product pages.  Also, next issue there will be an a5 lifestyle supplement called ‘ps…' bundled with it (as well as going out on it’s own for a month(ish) beforehand).  I’m going to be doing two fashion shoots, one studio and one on location so I’m really looking forward to it.  We have two great models lined up and the clothes etc have started coming in for it and I’ve picked up my grey background paper :)  I think it’ll be a really cool wee supplement.

Anyway, here’s a couple other tear sheets from this issue, this one is from the shoot with Lyken and I think the black really suits it,

The next is from the same shoot as the cover.  The colours are a bit subdued here but in the magazine it’s much more vibrant.  I think it’s to do with the pdf I made of it.

This one is from a house in Fife that we did.  Worked with a really good stylist (Ali McCulloch) on this one and she dressed up the table really well, it made all the difference.

Last but not least is the blog watch feature.  It’s now a regular feature we run and it’s a great idea by the editor to highlight different design type blogs.  This issue she wanted to highlight mine since it’s linked in with the magazine and the Home Plus Scotland website will be up soon too so I’ll be linking to that.  Took some persuading as there’s many many many better blogs out there but I’m still quite happy with how it came out, apart from the picture of the ugly bloke!

Anyway, if anyone wants a glossy mag to read I’d definitely recommend HPS and not just because I’m involved with it, I really do think it’s a great mag :)  I’ll blog up about the fashion shoots too, they’re coming up in the next few weeks.  Also going to try some new food shots for HPS which will be fun.  Oh and I have a wedding to shoot this weekend!

Cheers
Ian :)