Neel from LearnFoodPhotography.com posed an interesting question to me in email a short time ago. He asked “What advice would you give to someone who is just starting to build their portfolio? What are some things to keep in mind?” This is actually a question I get very frequently. In fact, I’ve answered it here before, and I sent along some of my thoughts for Neel’s upcoming article.

But, as I was catching up today on some old magazines, I happened to read an article in the Dec/Jan Organic Gardening issue about hunger and malnutrition in America. Along with the article was a whole list of organizations trying to help this problem. Most of these are non-profit or governmental agencies… groups that don’t have a lot of money and rely on volunteers. The idea occurred to me that this is a great way for any food photographer to give back, and particularly, an interesting idea for those new to shooting food to develop their work.

I hear (and preach) not to give your work away for free all the time. I still stand by that, even for new photographers. But as in all of life, there are times to break the rules, and building your portfolio by volunteering your photos to groups that help feed hungry people or educate people about healthful eating? That sounds like a win all around to me.

Here are the groups listed in the Organic Gardening article, but I encourage you to check into food banks and services such as the United Way in your area for even more opportunities.

gardenwriters.org
ampleharvest.org
foodforward.org
portlandfruilt.org
pps.org
serve.gov/healthyfoods.asp

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

If you are looking for a simple photo editor, and don’t mind the slowness of uploading your photos to a server for your quick fixes, you should give PXN8 (pronounced pix-en-ate) a try. It provides all the basic corrections like an auto-exposure (called Enhance), fill flash, rotation and even some manual control over saturation, brightness and hue. But what’s particularly cool about PXN8 are the fun tools, including the easiest way to round the corners of your image that I’ve seen yet, and a nice little lomo filter. PXN8 also integrates easily with Flickr, so once you’ve uploaded your photo, getting the edited image into your Flickr account is a simple button press.

PXN8 is for smaller images (under 1Mb)… uploading a jpeg image from my 20D (about a 6 Mb file) took a painfully long time, and then it resized the image down to a web size. But once my photo was uploaded, all of the corrections were very quick. For the image above, I applied the lomo effect (which would have worked better on a darker image) and rounded the corners, pushed the changes over the Flickr and was done in about a minute.

Or, for even an even more tightly integrated editor, check out Preloadr, which works on photos you’ve already uploaded to Flickr, but want to make quick changes to. Moving into the “editing” space was a bit slow for my large images, but unlike PXN8, Preloadr seems to keep my image size intact… so it’s not too surprising it’s not as zippy. Preloadr also offers more advanced tools, like layers, a histogram and even an exposure curve… but leaves off some of the cool quick fixes (like the lomo filter and rounding the corners.) Still, if you are working with 1Mb or smaller file sizes and just need to brighten up your whites or saturate your colors, Preloadr may be what you need.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Tips

So, imagine my disappointment when I went to try out Firefox and pulled up my blog and found, instead of the beautiful rich colors I was expecting, photos that looked dull and dead.

I certainly know that getting color right is hard… different displays show colors in different ways depending on how they are calibrated… different lighting conditions in the room also play a big role… but I was looking at the same photo on the same web page on the same computer in two different browsers and getting very different results:

The image on the left is in Safari on the Mac, the browser I normally use as do only about 8% of my readers. The image on the right is from Firefox, which makes up about 12% of my readership.

The issue is color space. A color space is a map of colors created by different variables plotted on different axis. There are lots of different color spaces, and each one has slightly different colors as well as a different number of supported colors (this is called a gamut). Everything has a gamut… the photo itself, the display’s capabilities and even the capabilities of the software. Ideally, you want the source (the photo in this case) to have all of its colors contained in a smaller gamut than its output (the display) gamut. When they don’t, you get color loss. Of course, if the output gamut is a lot bigger than the sources gamut, then you aren’t taking advantage of all the colors that you can. It’s a balancing act. Understanding color spaces is highly scientific with a bit of voodoo on the side for kicks… I know several people that I used to work with that have pretty much devoted their lives to this art… mapping out Reds, Greens and Blues (RGB); Hue, Saturation and Luminosity (HSL); Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) and many, many others. I consider myself lucky that I am not one of them.

For my purposes, I only care about one of these… RGB. Actually, I care about only certain variations of RGB… namely sRGB and Adobe RGB. sRGB was designed in 1996 to support monitors at that time. As monitor technology has improved, the number of colors that modern displays can show has greatly increase. So today, sRGB seems very limiting. The canvas can accept a lot more colors than are on the palette. Adobe RGB was developed in 1998 so it’s a little bit newer and holds more colors, particularly in the greens and cyans. It still isn’t the best overall color space, but it’s become a standard for digital photography. (For those curious, the LAB colorspace offers twice as many colors as Adobe RGB and was designed to map out all of the colors that the human eye can see… it’s almost entirely a mathematical problem, and all representations are inherently inaccurate, but there’s lots of equation fun to be had in the Wiki post.)

What it comes down to is that neither sRGB or Adobe RGB is a perfect solution… for software that supports Adobe RGB, the images can look deeper and richer. But, the software has to support it to achieve the effect. When it doesn’t, the images actually look worse. sRGB is a baseline standard, so you can be fairly confident that if you use this color space, you now what your images will look like, even if you can’t get them as rich as you would like. Predictable or Rich. You have to pick.

Some software, like Photoshop and Safari, can understand both of these colorspaces and display the color accurately as intended… so you don’t have to choose. However, other software, like Firefox, doesn’t support Adobe RGB at all, so as in the example above, any photos saved with this color space will look washed out. Files saved with an sRGB color profile may still look a bit different from program to program, but they will come a lot closer because they map better to having “no” color information.

Here is the same photo from above saved with an sRGB color profile instead of Adobe RGB:

Click for a better view

The Safari version still looks good… in fact, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference. The Firefox sRGB version looks acceptable…there’s a bit more gold to the cake and a bit more red in the lettuce. It’s still not as vibrant as the Safari version, but at least it’s not as grey as the one on the far right with the Adobe RGB profile.

If you take photos in JPEG format on your camera, they will most likely be set to the sRGB color space by default. You probably won’t need to do anything to them, although it wouldn’t hurt to check them out in Firefox to make sure that your camera doesn’t embed a proprietary color space.

If you are edit your photos iPhoto 5, even if you start with JPEGs, your color space will change from sRGB to generic RGB (which is similar to Adobe RGB). I don’t use iPhoto, so I don’t know if this has been fixed in v6 or not, but I’m betting it’s buried even if it is. If you are editing your photos in iPhoto, you should definitely check to see if it’s changing your color space. If it is, you’ll end up needing to use a different tool to do your editing.

If you take photos in your camera’s Raw format, it’s likely that you will be using the wrong color profile for images for the web.

In Adobe Camera Raw, it’s easy to make the change. In the bottom left corner, there is a selection for the default color space:

Simply switch this from Adobe RGB to sRGB, and proceed on with the rest of your workflow. Once you’ve set this, you shouldn’t need to change it again. You should also be able to change this setting within Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements).

Windows applications, such as Picasa and Microsoft Digital Image Suite should save in sRGB by default.

This isn’t the only problem with getting accurate digital color, or even the hardest problem… tackling the differences in displays is a huge issue that I can’t quite fathom how someone is going to solve. But, at least this is one that it’s easy to imagine being fixed. If the browser folks started supporting the various standards (Is various standards an oxymoron?) that are available today, it would make a huge difference. You can bet I’ll be pinging my IE friends to make sure that better color support is built into the next versions of IE… if anyone out there knows any Firefox developers, please, plant the seed! Either that, or all you Mac users should switch back to using Safari!

Update: If you want to see if your web browser is color managed, here is a quick tutorial that shows you the differences between properly managed and unmanaged images. If you don’t see a difference, than your browser isn’t showing you everything that should be.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Photoshop, Tips