If you’ve done your fair share of food photography, (or if I’m being honest, any type of photography) you’ve probably had a photo shoot or two that have gotten away from you. You set up the scene, you like what you see, you think you’ve got some great shots, then you upload all of them onto your machine and……….groan. You don’t have the photo goldmine you previously thought you’d found.
This has happened to me so many times. Oftentimes, if possible, I’m able to go re-shoot all the images but that isn’t always possible. Sometimes, I’ve gotten cocky and have torn everything down before uploading the pics because I’m so sure I have what I need. Other times, (like with these photos) I take the photos one day and upload them to my computer the next. So, obviously the mess has been cleaned up and there is far less of my “subject” than there was before.
So, let’s take a moment and look at what went wrong with these images and see what we can learn.
I didn’t check my settings very closely. It’s my habit to set up my scene and just take a quick photo, without checking my settings or anything, just to see where I stand at the beginning. I don’t know why I do it, it’s just what I do. Most of the times, the photo is completely useless and I’ll then check my settings and adjust accordingly. In this case, however, the photo wasn’t too far off from where I thought I’d like to be. So, I made a minor shutter speed adjustment, and started working away. It was only after I’d taken most of my photos that I discovered that my ISO was at 1600…waaaaay too high for what I needed. So, I dialed it down and took a few more at a much lower ISO. So, my tip to you, even if your first shot looks close, check your settings. Shooting at ISO 1600 wasn’t “wrong” in this case, I still had a decent exposure, but to get the look I was after, it was unnecessarily high.
Check your composition. Check it, check it, and then check it again. I thought I had some really well composed images, but when I went to upload them, I cringed. What was I thinking? Where was I standing? Was I even using my viewfinder at all? Composition can take an ordinary photo to a spectacular one…and vice versa. The composition in some of these shots makes me squirm…learn from my mistakes.
Finally, pay close attention to aperture. I failed to check mine for this shoot and ended up shooting the entire thing at f/2.2. There’s nothing wrong with that setting, but for shooting something where I needed parts of the photo in the foreground and the background to be fairly sharp, it was way too low. You can see where I missed on a couple of these shots, they would have been much crisper if I’d chosen to shoot at a higher aperture.
So, hopefully these tips will help you be pro-active and avoid finding yourself with a screen full of images that you don’t want to use. With a little more planning than I showed here, you should be all good!
Side note: This pumpkin apple cake is actually reallllly good. You can find the recipe here.
Bonus Tip: Don’t rely on editing to save you. If you have to do a ton of editing to your image, it’s probably not a keeper to being with…you should really only need very little editing on your food photos.
The post When Photo Shoots Go Wrong appeared first on A Sweet Spot Home.