It's that time of year again...dining guide time! Which means for a few blessed weeks I get to sample some of the finest cooking in Long Beach :) My food shooting kit fits in my LowePro backpack is small and easy to set up. I can usually get the light dialed in about 10 minutes. Almost all these shots were photographed using an XS Chimera softbox with an old Nikon SB-28 as the strobe and some Alien Bees wireless triggers. No tripod. All handheld (or I'm using the back of a chair for support). Sometimes its a real blessed life :)
After doing a few of these, I'm convinced that bicycling to these shoots is the way to do it. You shoot. Eat. Then burn off some of the food on the way to the next assignment. Repeat. I imagine that by doing it by car you must feel pretty gross at the end of the day.
4 comments:
Are you using reflectors for fill? Or is the Chimera the only game in town? Love your work, bro! You've got me looking into a G10!
I'm using a "reflector" for fill...i put it in quotes because it's a piece of ratty mat board that has food stains on it because I've been using it for two years :)
Hi Russ,
You're a very talented guy who takes great photographs and it's been a pleasure looking at your blog.
On a technical note, can you say if you're using differential focusing on the food shots or the Gaussian blur filter in Photoshop. Sometimes it's difficult to tell - especially if it's done well ;-)
Bruce
bruce,
thanks! for the food shots, it's pretty much all in camera depth of field...i try to shoot around 5.6 to get enough DOP for the details, but it's shallow enough to blur out the background...
all these shots were with a nikon d300/ 17-55 2.8 combo (lens zoomed out near the 55 end). this is actually where the DX sensor is nice because it gives more DOF per given F stop. I think if I were shooting FX I'd have to stop down to F8-11ish and need to pump more light (or I suppose I could bump the ISO, but for these I try to shoot at ISO 200).
R
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