Fun camera… but not what I actually do my work with…

Wow. It seems like I just posted my Guide to Food Photography gear… but it’s been almost a year, and I have realized a good chunk of my equipment has changed during that time. Since the number one question I get from readers is what gear do you use, I thought I’d give you a new peak into the studio & camera bags.

Camera

This year, I upgraded to a Canon 5D. Up until the first time I had it in my hands, I was a bit skeptical about upgrading to this body… torn between just squeezing every last little day out of my 20D to save up for a medium format camera, or holding out for a Canon 1Ds III. Well, in June, that changed. I needed a full frame sensor for a shoot, so I rented one locally for the weekend. I placed an order with Adorama as soon as I got back into town… that’s how much I loved it. Yes, the 1Ds III will be better… and one of these days, I really am going to get a digital medium format something or other. But, the 5D is a fantastic camera and it’s going to keep me happy for quite a while.

That said, initially, the 5D has caused me some pain. Because it’s a full frame sensor, the lenses I knew and loved all became wider… and not just a little bit. The wideness is nice, but it often makes you feel like you need to get in closer… which means I’m constantly hitting the minimal focus distance on my lenses. My goto lens for a good chunk of this year has been the 45mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift, but with the 5D, it just can’t get close enough for a lot of my shots. I started falling back almost exclusively to the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro. But, I missed my tilting and shifting so much, that finally I broke down and bought the Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens. Great lens. Great great lens. I love this lens. If you are shooting full frame, and shooting food, it’s definitely worth getting one.

Of course I’m still shooting quite often with my 50mm f1.4, but I also added the 85mm f/1.8. The drawback of the 85 is a pretty far minimal focal distance.. but it is such a great portrait lens, it’s worth ignoring that part. I love this lens for taking action shots of people and food in the kitchen.

I also still use the 24-105mm f/4L, primarily for a monthly shoot that I do for Seattle Magazine called Chef Test. Each month, I do a portrait of a chef taste testing ingredients, and this lens is just perfect for this (on a tripod, with sufficient light btw). Also in my lens bag are the 200mm f/2.8L and the 17-40mm f/4L, neither of which I use for food photography but both of which are nice lenses for travel.

Remember the Canon EP-EX15 Eyepiece Extender I talked about last year? I still love this… but I must warn you, if you use it, you will likely end up buying many more eye piece cups. They tend to slide off very easily. I’ve gone through about 5 cups now. But, it still nicer than a smudgy display.

I also love my Remote Switch, which lets me take photos on slow shutter speed without having to mess around with the timer. I picked up a little wireless remote a few weeks ago. It was great fun. For one afternoon. Then the battery died. Maybe it was a bad one, so I’ll see how it goes once I replace it.

This shot was taken in my old kitchen, but I still have those same lights.

Lighting

My lighting really hasn’t changed much this year. I still use natural light… south and west facing windows, covered with frosted vellum when it is really sunny out. And, of course, my favorite free thing in the world: a few big sheets of styrofoam board to act as a bounce.

I’m still using the Lowel Tota system, which is a reasonably priced start into studio lighting. The Tota-Pak includes a 750W tungsten halogen lamp with bulb, a stand and an umbrella is regularly $280. The V-Light Pak, which is 500W is on sale as well for about $5 less. The Tota-frame and Assorted Lighting Gel Set for the Tota-lamps are nice too, although I don’t use them all that much.

Maybe it was because I was reading a bit too much Strobist, but I did venture into some off camera flash this year, and picked up the Canon Speedlite 580EX Flash which I can use to create some nice off camera flash when used as a master with my old 430EX Speedlite. When I use the flash, I always soften it with some sort of diffuser.

I picked up the Lowel EGO Tabletop Fluorescent Light for an additional small table top lamp, as well as the Lowel EGO Sweep Table-top Background Support Stand. This is a nice inexpensive setup for tabletop photography.

I also have a very small fresnel light by Mole-Richardson that I use only for special cases that I need just a little bit of extra light in one spot. It’s fairly dramatic lighting, esp with all the accessories you can put on it.

My studio, on day 1 of my move. That whole shelf is full now, as is the closet (below). Those windows, btw, are my main light source.

Props & Accessories

My tripod is a set of Manfrotto legs and a Really Right Stuff ball head. This is a heavy duty studio tripod… the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to throw into a backpack and take with you, but excellent in the studio. I also have a great arm that clamps onto my tripod for holding onto miscellaneous gear like reflective discs.

Look at all that room! Not so much a mere 3 months later…

My prop closet has grown. It’s really not a single closet anymore. It’s at least 2, although one of the shelving units isn’t actually in a closet. It’s scary. We need to get earthquake insurance. I’d try to describe what I have, but it’s really too big at this point. If I could have it, I probably do. And, I’m always picking up new things here and there as I find bargains. The one thing I don’t have is pewter… must get going on that.

White is always a great choice for props.

If you are just starting out, make sure you have a good variety of white plates and bowls, and some simple flatware. Trays (like wooden breakfast trays) are really nice to have too. Forks appear most frequently in my shots, quickly followed by spoons. I tend to use the smaller flatware more frequently, but I also have a couple of interesting serving tools, like a copper ladle and coffee scoop. Ebay, thrift stores, CB2, Cost Plus, Pier One are all good places to go to find inexpensive props. Also, ask at the store if they have a rental program. Many places, like Crate & Barrel do, and you can just rent things for 20% of their cost as long as you bring them back with the tags on and in new condition. This is particularly good if you need something like a table for a shot, but don’t want to pony up the money for a full table or maybe, like me, don’t really have the space for one.

For backdrops, head to your local fabric store. You can get some good deals on cloth paying by the yard. Who cares if the edges aren’t finished when they don’t show up in the photo. Also, hand-made paper found at arts supply stores or card stores makes for some really nice backdrops, esp when you have a working sweep.

For a more finished look, I also have a fairly wide selection of towels and linen napkins that can be folded and placed under or around dishes. I prefer simple patterns and solids, in fairly light colors for these… but I do have the occasional piece that is quite bright and playful. I find most of my linens in the sales racks.

For styling your food, a good set of tools to have on hand are a pair of chopsticks (for pushing, poking or picking things up), tweezers, toothpicks, a pair of manicure scissors, some cotton swabs, a spray bottle (with water) and plenty of paper towels. Joe Glo wipes are also really good for little clean-ups. Also, my new favorite quick clean stuff are the Method wipes.

Computers & Software

In my last post, I talked about software, but didn’t talk about my computer at all. If you’ve been reading the blog and comments, you might have seen a Mac vs PC debate going on. You won’t get me going too much on that kind of debate. I know people have personal preferences that make them very passionate about what OS they use. I’m fine with that. If you have something you love, great!

As for what I use, I have a MacBook Pro. I like it. It’s pretty. It goes pretty fast. It has all the apps that I need. It annoys me sometimes too. But, that is true of any computer. My next computer will be a desktop Mac with one of those gorgeous Apple Flat-Panel Displays, which will be color calibrated all the time and more storage space than I can pronounce. Hopefully, this will be soon.

For image editing, I’ve upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium. It’s really, really expensive (I had a bit of a discount through a friend), but it has Photoshop CS3 along with web design, illustration and print design tools. If you don’t need advanced editing, just go with Photoshop Elements. If you outgrow it, Adobe is generally pretty good with giving upgrade discounts. Or, if you are really just getting started, you can always go with iPhoto on the Mac or Picasa on the PC without any outlay of cash.

That said, I almost exclusively use Phase One’s Capture One Pro now, and only go into Photoshop if I need to do something like clean up a wrinkle or a crumb (or, ack, sensor dust!). Capture One is a raw workflow tool that lets me shoot tethered to my Mac. I have a long USB cable that connects my camera to my Mac, and as soon as I take the photo, it’s on my laptop and I can see it full res to make sure that I’m getting what I wanted. It’s completely changed the way that I shoot and edit, and I couldn’t be happier about it. But, it was a serious expense. Unless you are going pro, there is no reason to pay that kind of money.

I also still just use Adobe Bridge for my “organization.” It’s fine. It’s kind of lame. This is an area I really need to improve on, so expect a post on that sometime in the next several months… or sometime after the new Mac gets bought and installed.

For other software, my blogs are powered by WordPress. I use a client editor called Ecto. I’m currently using Firefox for browsing, in support of their recent announcement to start respecting image colorspace info (Ya-hoo!) I also use an app called FileChute, in conjunction with my .Mac account, to help me get files to my clients. It’s kind of nice because you just drag the files on, it zips them up for you, posts them, and gives you a URL. Then, you just email the URL to your client and they can download the photos. You can even password it if you want. Neat.

So, that’s it! Well, I’m surely forgetting something… but that probably means I don’t use it all that much.

If you have a favorite gadget or must-have piece of gear, please feel free to leave it in the comments!

One of my early posts on Still Life With walked through my workflow of taking food shots in my studio (ie, my kitchen). Well, I recently realized how much a seemingly small change has made to my overall workflow. That change was starting to shoot tethered to my laptop, and it’s had numerous impacts on the steps I follow.

To shoot tethered, I have a long cable that attaches to the USB port on my camera (still the Canon 20D) and my MacBook Pro. I’m using Phase One’s Capture One which allows me to capture directly to my Mac. It’s an expensive app ($499), but the free Canon Raw software has problems with the Intel-based Macs (problems being it doesn’t work)… plus Capture One is a stellar piece of software that has great tools for adjusting white balance and exposure.

The benefit is that you see the results of each shot as you take them… so you know what problems are lurking and can fix them before the next shot. To get the most control to fix exposure, I’m shooting in manual mode where I set both the aperture and the shutter speed for the shot. It’s easy to see if I’m under or over exposing the image, as I see a histogram of each shot… this allows me to quickly correct any exposure problems in camera… the best place to do it. Despite improvements in camera’s abilities to figure out the right exposure, the camera doesn’t know the shot I want to take as well as I do… and I end up much happier with my shots when I take that control myself. Take for example this photo for this month’s Flickr Still Life With White theme.

As I shot the image, I was able to adjust the shutter speed to get a nice, wide histogram giving me lots of variation in the whites of the ice cream. Little nooks and crannies have shadows and the highlights are bright but not blown out. If the image was too dark or too bright, I’d know it immediately and stop up or down to correct the problem.

Similarly, before each shooting session, I set my camera’s custom white balance. To do this, I just shoot a white card (I actually use a 5×7 piece of photo paper), and then set the camera’s custom white balance setting to this. On my 20D, I have to shoot untethered to take the white card shot and get it written to the card… then I have to set the Custom WB function in the menu as well as setting the the white balance selector on the top of the camera.

Even though I set the camera’s white balance, I often find that I want to tweak it a bit. Here’s where Capture One really shines. Correcting white problems in Photoshop is incredibly tricky, requiring multiple complicated tools like color balance and curves. In Capture One, it’s a breeze. Simply select the eyedropper tool and click on what should be a neutral color. Most of the time, it gets it right. Sometimes, the white balance is right, but it’s not the look I’m going for. A quick tweak of a slider for color temperature and one for tint gives me the control I need.

The other incredibly helpful tool in Capture One is the magnifying glass, which allows you to very quickly get a 100% view of a small section of the image to check for sharpness. I find that shooting with my 100mm I can focus pretty easily, but with the 50mm or 45mm can be much trickier to get just the right plane perfectly sharp. It may even look sharp in the screen sized image, but a look at the 100% image is the only way to really tell… and that’s pretty important for prints.

There are a ton of other great features too… the rotate is elegant, a set crop is easy to apply to a whole set of images (as are all the other edits), and you can even click the shutter from the app reducing camera shake even more than using a remote. But, back to my workflow.

I cull the bad images as I go along, so at the end of shooting, I’ve got the three to five shots that I was trying to get. While shooting takes a bit longer because of the inevitable tweaking of the photos along the way, the whole process is a bit quicker. Plus, I find that I get more exercise… instead of sitting on the couch for a few hours editing photos, I edit standing up (or sometimes squatting on the floor when the sun is making it hard to see my monitor when it’s on the counter!)

When I’m done shooting, there is no more weeding out the good ones from hundreds and almost no need to adjust exposure or color… just some fine tuning and cleaning up spots and bits. Capture One makes it easy to process the Raw files and output as either TIFF or JPEG. I save all the CR2s (Raw) and output as TIFF. This does take up a lot of space, but I’m happier having the highest resolution files around that I can.

Of course, the TIFF files don’t do me much good for my blog. As I’m cleaning up any imperfections on the TIFFs, I decide if the photo is going to get posted to Flickr or my blog. If it does, I slap a small watermark on it and save the watermarked version out to a folder with all my watermarked images. If the images don’t need any fine tuning (ie, removing random dust, etc.) then I will just output the JPEG file from Capture One. It has a great tool for adding a watermark as part of the conversion process. In fact, I’m getting to the point that I rarely use PhotoShop on my photos at all. It’s encouraged me to make more careful styling choices… to remove distracting crumbs or fingerprints before I shoot, just so I can save the overall post-processing time.

I don’t care too much about the watermarked photos once I’ve posted them, so I can clean this folder out fairly frequently to minimize space. All the other photos live on my laptop and get backed up to another machine in my house about once a month (I should do it more frequently). The server has automated backups, so once the images are there, they are on two separate hard drives. I keep a fair number of recent photos on my laptop, but start expiring raw and TIFF images as I need the space.

When I’m shooting for a client, I don’t add watermarks… instead, I create a whole set of images in different folders… a folder for TIFFs, full-sized JPEGs, websized JPEGs and Thumbnails. Creating the websized images is quite straightforward, but the thumbnails are a bit tricky if the client wants them to be square instead of proportional. For square thumbs, I like to create them by hand to ensure I get a good crop on the image. Of course, some images don’t look good square… but most have some interesting crop that will work. I also apply a bit of unsharp mask to the thumbnail sizes to crisp them up a bit. I do all of this in Photoshop.

Shooting tethered and investing in a product like Capture One isn’t for everyone. It’s expensive and in some ways rather restrictive. But, it’s also done more to improve my photography than anything else. The instant feedback on exposure and DOF has taught me to anticipate for future shots, and I never would have started shooting manual without that kind of feedback.

Technorati Tags: Food, Photography, Photoshop, Tips

Camera

I’m still shooting with a Canon EOS 20D for most of my shots. I love this camera… it’s a great size and produces beautiful shots. Of course, the Canon EOS 5D is on my wishlist… but I think it’s still many months off.

In the studio, I shoot with one of three lenses almost exclusively: the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro, the 50mm f1.4 and the 45mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Before I got the tilt-shift, I used the 50mm quite frequently… but it’s so close to the 45mm, that I rarely use in the studio anymore. 75% of my shots are now with the 45 T/S. It is an amazing lens.

Outside of the studio is a different story. For shooting on location with minimal gear, the 50mm 1.4 is a must have. Nothing else handles low light like this lens (ok, the 1.2 version would, but can anyone afford it?). I also love to take the 24-105mm f/4L, which is a great lens for well-lit shots and gives a bit more flexibility for framing. Just the little bit of zoom handles most of the shots I want to take. If I’m up for bringing a 3rd lens with me, then it’s the 200mm f/2.8L , which is my favorite telephoto lens… cheaper than the 70-200 2.8 and a bit crisper.

I also have some accessories. My favorite is the Canon EP-EX15 Eyepiece Extender, which lets me look through the view finder without always smudging up the display on the camera. Such a simple little thing, yet it makes me so happy.

I also love my Remote Switch, which lets me take photos on slow shutter speed without having to mess around with the timer. Of course, I’m sure I’d also like the Wireless Radio Remote too.

Lighting

A good portion of my lighting is free, or nearly so. Big windows and french doors that face south and west. I’ve covered the southern windows with a frosted vellum that is available at art supply stores by the roll. That, and a few big sheets of styrofoam board are my lighting solution for about 75-80% of my photos.

When I don’t have enough light, I use the Lowel Tota system, which is a reasonably priced start into studio lighting. The Tota-Pak includes a 750W tungsten halogen lamp with bulb, a stand and an umbrella is regularly $280, but I just noticed that it is on sale for $194 on Amazon right now. The V-Light Pak, which is 500W is on sale as well for about $5 less. I haven’t used them yet, but I recently got the Tota-frame and Assorted Lighting Gel Set for the Tota-lamps as well.

I also have a very small fresnel light by Mole-Richardson that I use only for special cases that I need just a little bit of extra light in one spot. It’s fairly dramatic lighting, esp with all the accessories you can put on it.

Props & Accessories

My tripod is a set of Manfrotto legs and a Really Right Stuff ball head. This is a heavy duty studio tripod… the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to throw into a backpack and take with you, but excellent in the studio. I also have a great arm that clamps onto my tripod for holding onto miscellaneous gear like reflective discs.

White dishes are my most frequently used, but I have quite a few solid color things as well. And some dishes with Asian prints. But, if you are just starting out, make sure you have a good variety of white plates and bowls, and some simple flatware. Forks appear most frequently in my shots, quickly followed by spoons. I tend to use the smaller flatware more frequently, but I also have a couple of interesting serving tools, like a copper ladle and coffee scoop.

For backdrops, head to your local fabric store. You can get some good deals on cloth paying by the yard. Who cares if the edges aren’t finished when they don’t show up in the photo. Also, hand-made paper found at arts supply stores or card stores makes for some really nice backdrops, esp when you have a working sweep.

For a more finished look, I also have a fairly wide selection of towels and linen napkins that can be folded and placed under or around dishes. I prefer simple patterns and solids, in fairly light colors for these… but I do have the occasional piece that is quite bright and playful. I find most of my linens in the sales racks.

For styling your food, a good set of tools to have on hand are a pair of chopsticks (for pushing, poking or picking things up), tweezers, a pair of manicure scissors, some cotton swabs, a spray bottle (with water) and plenty of paper towels. Joe Glo wipes are also really good for little clean-ups.

Software

I reference Photoshop CS2 for most of the articles on Still Life With. It’s really, really expensive but it’s also just about the only tool that you can use to do advanced editing. If you don’t need advanced editing, just go with Photoshop Elements. If you outgrow it, Adobe is generally pretty good with giving upgrade discounts. Or, if you are really just getting started, you can always go with iPhoto on the Mac or Picasa on the PC without any outlay of cash.

My newest software necessity is Phase One’s Capture One Pro. It’s a raw workflow tool that lets me shoot tethered to my Mac. I have a long USB cable that connects my camera to my Mac, and as soon as I take the photo, it’s on my laptop and I can see it full res to make sure that I’m getting what I wanted. It’s completely changed the way that I shoot and edit, and I couldn’t be happier about it. But, it was a serious expense. Unless you are going pro, there is no reason to pay that kind of money. That said, I’ll have more info on shooting tethered in an upcoming post.

BTW – I’ve been thrilled to get so many mails asking me my opinion on this stuff. I’m very happy to help… so if you have other questions, do feel free to shoot them my way!

Technorati Tags: camera gear, Food, Food Styling, Photography, shopping