food lighting for people who live in submarines

I'd posted a few days ago some tips on photographing your food using window light and a point-and-shoot camera. A few people mentioned that they had no windows. And it's for these sad souls that I'm going to post some lighting tips about how I photographed this morning's breakfast.



How to photos of the windowless setup

Light is everywhere, without it, we're lost. But not all light is created equal. This makes some people's food photos look more pleasing than other peoples. Professionals like to use window light when they can, but it can't always be eleven a.m. on a sunny day, so they need to be able to recreate good light whenever they want. The quality of light is determined by several factors, the one we're going to look at today is the size of the source direct-on-camera flashes give probably the most horrible light one can imagine and this is, in part, because the SIZE of the light source is a bulb about an inch long and a quarter of an inch high. This gives very sharp shadows. The larger the source of the light, the softer the shadows. You can see here there are very nice, soft shadows.



This is done with a studio lighting device called a "soft box" which is basically just a box, dark on four sides, with a sheet of fabric over the fourth side, you put a flash (or a light bulb) inside it, and the source of the light is no longer the tiny flash bulb, but instead this two by three foot piece of fabric, the closer we get this to the subject, the better (the rule of thumb is that the diagonal measurement of the softbox is the ideal distance from the fabric to the subject). A softbox costs somewhere between $30 and $100 -- they're essential in studio lighting. The flash can be either an ordinary hot-shoe mounted "on camera" flash attached to your camera by a long cord, or a more powerful studio light (like this Alien Bees). Studio lights start at around $90 new and go up to many hundreds of dollars.

Another option instead of a softbox is an umbrella, which you can also get at a camera supply store and they start at about $10. OR, you can totally do it yourself and make a softbox out of a cardboard box and a bedsheet.

If you're interested in getting into studio photography you can probably find lighting kits at places like bhphotovide.com or adorama.com starting around $150 for a flash (often called a "strobe head"), a light stand, and an umbrella. Don't get a sophisticated kit with three lights and all sorts of other stuff. To start out you need one flash, one stand, one umbrella (or softbox) something to mount the umbrella or the softbox to the flash, and a cord that connects your camera to the flash. that's it. it's great for photographing food and people.






Hope this helps. Next week, how to do this with a point and shoot and no studio lights. More photos of my food and other madness in my lj.