Making Great Images!

Making Great Images!

by William Lulow

I wrote a piece last December about how to be a good photographer. I have been thinking about that again recently, and I suppose it comes down to how one approaches the task of making images. If most of your images are essentially “grab” shots, that is, you don’t do any planning other than to make sure your photographs are lit properly and exposed correctly, then they will never rise above the level of mediocre. Yes, they will be okay. People will view them, but not really have any kind of visceral reaction to them. In order to elicit a more intense response, you will have to go about making the images with more intensity yourself. There are those who say, “Oh, just take a quick picture of my food plates so I will have a record of them.” Or, “I just need a shot of myself for my Linked In page.” These are people who just want to get the job done without really thinking too much about it or spending the time it takes to get a really good photograph.

As commercial photographers, we are often faced with having to make really great shots in very little time. I recall having to get some food shots for a client, but I would have to make them at an event rather than have the food lit professionally in a studio setting with many lights and other “tricks” used that make the food look really delicious. Photographers who photograph food all the time have certain little touches or tricks they use to make the food look great. One such trick is to use Elmer’s Glue instead of milk when shooting cereal. Elmer’s stands up under studio lighting conditions and will not make the cereal look soggy, which it might after an hour or two of shooting, and it sure looks like milk. You wouldn’t want to eat it though. Another little technique food photographers use is to spray glicerin on certain foods to act as water and reflect light, giving everything a nice shine. Glicerin doesn’t evaporate the way water does and it has a much higher boiling point, so it will last on a studio set much longer. When you are shooting at a party setting, you obviously can’t do these things. But there are other techniques you can use to make the food really stand out.

Since light, and how it is applied is really the most important element in a photograph, I have taken to using bounce light to create the soft effects I want when I can’t use my typical studio lighting techniques. I use a Main Light on my camera consisting of a portable flash unit outfitted with a bounce flash reflector. This is what I use:

This unit is large enough to produce soft lighting for most small products. The way to produce really soft light is to have the Main Light much larger than the subject. The larger, the better, to a given point.

Here is a shot using this technique:

This looks like it could have been a studio shot, but was really made at a banquet for about 200 people. No “tricks” were used on the food.  Here’s another one:

Sometimes I will use one or two accent lights attached to light stands and fired by radio remote control, in order to add some highlights to the setup:

Although this is not a “food” shot, I use it to illustrate where my accent lights were placed and the effect they have on the overall lighting scheme itself. Here you can see what the highlights on the people would be and where the lights were. Obviously, on any final image, I would crop out the lights themselves.

Here is more of a “studio” shot with accent lights on the food. This was taken in a caterer’s kitchen. I set up a complete studio environment right then and there:

There were two accent lights on either side of the set, a large softbox as the Main Light and a smaller softbox as a fill-in light, both placed in front of the subject. This is the kind of lighting I always try to replicate when I use my portables because it really makes the subject stand out and be noticed.