As promised, I will share some of my adventures with food photography with you today. So, after attending the food photography presentation by Simon Park, I got interested and attempted some food photography myself. I will be talking about 2 events that happened over the course of a few days. Check them out after the jump.So coincidental, after the food photography presentation with Simon Park, I went out to dinner with my family. I live near Rhodes, so for convenience, we went to Tomodachi, a sushi train place in the Rhodes Shopping Centre. From the outside, this restaurant looks nice, and has an Asian feel for it.
Anyway, since Tomodachi is a sushi train place, we obviously had to eat at the counter, in front of the train itself. The variety of the sushi there was quiet abundant, from tuna to eel to chicken to scallops to soft shelled crap. The prices were what you would expect from sushi train, ranging from about $3 to $6 depending on the type of sushi you get. Also, you can order directly from the chefs for any sushi you particularly want, and you will be charged with its respective plate colour.
Lets look at this at a student's perspective. For sushi, and a variety of sushi, I think I paid a reasonable amount. I spent around $20 for about 3 or 4 plates and a drink. Although it sounds like a lot of money for a few plates of sushi, if you were to buy sushi from other places, it would cost just as much. Thankfully I was eating with my parents so I didn't have to pay =D. In terms of food quality, I wouldn't say it was bad, but I also wouldn't say it left a mark either.
I would recommend this place for those who feel like sushi, but don't want to pay a huge amount for sushi, and for those who just want the novelty of picking out sushi off a rotating track.
Photography
Now for the photography side of things. Since I just learnt about food photography, I tried to apply most of the techniques that I learnt from the presentation. I tried filling the screen with the food, and balanced the aperture, so that the DoF wasn't too thin or that there weren't too much in focus.
Being indoors, the ISO had to put up to around 800. This is the limit I would like to put it up to before noise becomes a problem. Too bad I don't have a 5D right? =[ The settings were basically kept constant, at shutter speed 1/80, aperture f4 and ISO 800. Keeping this constant allowed me to focus a bit more on composition and angles.
From seeing many pictures of food being close up, and cut off at one side, I tried a similar technique. I also played around with the background elements, in order to try and make them less distracting. I think they turned out all right, but it is not anything great. A tip I learnt from this is that you should try thinking out of the box. Since I was following the tips I gained from the presentation, most of the shots looked very similar. In other words, quite boring.
Another cool thing Simon showed us, was the pouring shot of a drink or sauce of some kind. The main tip he told us is to make it look ABUNDANT. Make it look like you are generous with the sauce and take the shot near the end of the pour. Below is my result from playing with a coke bottle.
Since this has already been quite a long post, I will continue with part 2 another time. We basically went to Cabramatta and took some food photography shots for lunch and various other street shots.
Until next time!!
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