Food photography at the LBMA...

Some more food photography, this time at the LBMA. I arrived and it was after hour's at the restaurant. One of the most striking features of the outdoor seating are the bright yellow umbrellas. They were closed at the time, but the writers I were with opened them up so that I could get a nice background (thanks Jenny and Greg).



The other challenge was balancing the light from the outside and the light on the food. I first tried to strobe it with a softbox but it looked so harsh. Fortunately, I brought a diffuser. I positioned the food so that it was getting hit with a hard beam of light that we diffused. This let me bridge the exposure difference between the light on the food and the outside and nothing was getting blown out.



So, I got my yellow umbrellas and balanced light. The next part was to play with the plating of the food with the chef. We tried a few things and settled on a more dynamic (if a salad can be dynamic) arrangement of the salad. Half-tossed with bright red strawberries sort of haphazardly placed and mangos against the white plate as a sort of visual border. It was topped off with a few vertical elements to balance the picture (in this case a mimosa and nice bottle of champagne).