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I hope this helps.

Or at least inspires you to go read someone else's tutorial where they might explain it better. For more good reading Diythemes has a good tutorial on this and more.

 

If you like Brown crumpled paper icons they have more!

Some of you have been asking me about how I take pictures of food.

Well I feel highly unqualified to write this because I’m learning as I go. I read read read articles by anyone who’s work I like.  I’ve read a few books about food photography and each time I pick up the book new things make sense to me.

I’ll got over the yellow eye hummus photos and what I did.

I chose a good light source with sorta north facing windows. I read something about north facing windows being good. I didn’t know why and went to where I have good light in my house and then realized it was a NORTHISH facing window!

 

Next I took a half used half sheet of white tissue paper and used half a piece of tape an taped it low on the window to diffuse the light that will be coming in at food level. 

 

Recently I have done some reading about reflectors. I think it was Sommer at A Spicy perspective who said she used a tripod and a reflector. Since her photos are really mouth wateringly good That got me curious as to what a reflector was. I read somewhere that you could DIY with aluminum foil or white foam board. So I looked around my house and found this foil like stuff that came out of some packing.

I must say a reflector does a lot!

 

 

Once I’d made the hummus I was ready to build my plate. I chose a plate color that wasn’t brown because my hummus was brown. The table was almost the same shade as the hummus so I looked around real quick for some other color. I spotted the curtain on the door. Two seconds later the curtain rod sat empty.

 

I looked at it and did not like how dull the raw broccoli looked.

 

So I grabbed a few and sprayed them ever so lightly with olive oil spray. I’d vaguely remembered reading something about some food looking better when it shines.

 

  f/6.3  ISO400  50mm  1/50 sec

I looked at it on the computer and decided that red and white checkered pattern was competing with, not complimenting at all. Even after de-saturating the red it was still annoying me.

 

f/6.3 ISO400 50mm 1/50 sec

So I took the table cloth away!

 

And I will never take the curtain off the door again.

 

I hope I’ve helped with some of your questions.

~PN

---

I did it, I finally made one of these little planets.

 

I took a bunch of pictures all around me from standing in one spot.

 

Stitched them together in Photoshop to make one panoramic image.

Next I watched this guy’s video on how to make your own little world. I don’t know what he did in Lightroom so I just skipped to the part about what to do once you have a panoramic image. He explained it as he went along, not those annoying ones with just music.

 

So I followed his steps and came up with this! What? Cool, I guess but I wanted my own little world.

 

I hit play again and at the very end he explained you just turn your panoramic image that you just stretched into a distorted square upside down before you go to Filter> distort> polar coordinates.

And there it was a little planet that looks like it’s having a bad hair day!

 

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The best thing about breaking my wide angle lens is I can’t get much of a panoramic photo or more like can’t get any. Actually that’s not the best thing at all.

 

 

Because of this I was motivated to learn how to stitch photos together. I wait to learn things until I really need to. Maybe it sticks better in my brain that way.

 

Or maybe it was because I heard someone say they’d stitched a bunch of photos together to make one image, and they have a super awesome fancy pants camera and in the back of my mind I had this thought that went somethin’ like this:

I may not have a super awesome fancy pants camera but that doesn’t mean I can’t stitch photos together anyway.

 

  Super awesome fancy pants camera people are some of the friendliest people I’ve met and more than willing to share what they know.  The Three Amigos  here were  shooting with their  super awesome fancy pants cameras  from my favorite spot and were more than happy to answer all of my questions. That one in the middle is some kind of camera I’ve never heard of before that takes 80mb files! It’s cool though, He’s a Habs fan watched ‘em at the Forum.

 

   

 

I don’t know if I did it the most efficient way and I’m sure there are many other ways to do it, but  this is how I stitched 4 photos.

I used Photoshop but I ‘m sure you can do it in Gimp too.

Open all photos you want to stitch and then open a new blank image (File >Open >New.)

Make it large enough to fit all your photos you want to stitch.

Drag in each photo onto the blank image and line it up as best you can. As you line them up temporarily adjust the opacity of the layer to 75% so you can see the layer it’s over lapping. If you kept the camera level as you took all your photos this job will be a lot easier.

Don’t ask me how I know.

 

Then comes the fun part! Select all layers then tell it to align layers (Edit > Auto-align layers…)  Then just sit back and wait for the magic. I used a light eraser on the edges of the layers that overlapped. 

 

If you’re like me and shot without a polarizing filter because you didn’t yet realize how important that was, it might look a little dull and wanting just a little something more.

 

I tried a vibrancy layer at 15%

and a curves layer, the auto preset to “increase contrast”. Then I set the opacity to 56% because 100% was too much.

Saved it as a jpeg and that was it.

White balance settings have always been on my camera and I’ve always tried to use the correct one for the moment but tonight I used them to get different effects on the same shot and see what the differences were.


I first tried the setting for direct sunlight.


Then I set it to cloudy. Not a lot different but a little redish.


This is the fluorescent setting. Blue, I like that.


This is the incandescent setting. Similar to the fluorescent.


And the shade setting.
I wasted a bit of time changing settings, I changed it through the menu. Depending on your camera you may have a dedicated button you can change the white balance with.
I do, I just forget to use it.


I do shoot in JPEG and Raw so I probably could get all these effects on the computer later. I like Raw,  I went to the computer to see just what Raw can do.

This is what it looked like. All yellowy! That is not the way the sky looked. That’s when I saw I still had my white balance on direct sunlight.

Same photo AFTER. I changed the white balance with the computer and played around with every possible setting, color, hue saturation, brightness, contrast.
Hope I haven’t confused you with that but have inspired you to  play around with some of those buttons on the camera.
And don’t always follow the rules. Break a few,
just not all
Well not all,
all at the same time. 
you might get some photos you really like because of it.

What is HDR? Well, it looks cool.
I know this much, I need three photos of the same thing

One under exposed

one over exposed

and one just regularly exposed. 

(To make this collage I used Picasa because it is SO easy to make a collage and it’s free) 
Then in Photomatix I select the three photos and tell it to align based on features, that  way if I moved a bit while taking my three photos it’ll do it’s best to line them up. It kinda stacks the photos on top of each other and then you can run these adjustments on how dramatic of a look you want.



A little over the top, maybe. I like it on this bus.I did a more subtle HDR on a waterfalls photo. I was inspired by some beautiful waterfalls photos nicely HDR-ed by a photographer from Nashville. Mine wasn’t nearly as nice as his
but I’ll keep working on it.

This looks like little gnomes might come hopping out any minute.
Or maybe trolls.

I like to play around with my photos and see what happens. This morning I took some photos.

It looked like this straight out of the camera. I'm not super awesome with a camera by any stretch of the imagination  yet so that's what it looked like.



Here, I increased the vibrancy a little bit and desaturated every color except blue.
I think it's fun just to be able to do this.
So I did.

The Larkspur SOOTC -straight out of the camera.
F stop 3.5
1/250 sec
ISO 200
50mm

Cropped and added a little vibrancy. It helped the blue purple or is it purple blue? Well, it stands out, that's what it does.

Every once in a while I like a photo SOOTC -straight out of the camera and this is it, the one and only photo that I didn't have to adjust anything on!
F/3.5
1/400sec
ISO-200

I gave this a dreamier feel.
I brought the vibrancy up and the saturation down dont ask me what that does, it does something. They've got to be different otherwise there wouldn't be two options.
I look at it and if I like it I leave it.
I gave the highlights a yellow tint and the shadows a blue tint.

I promise I will never always do the dreamy thing to my photos!
I'll just do it sometimes.

 How it looked SOOTC -straight out of the camera

 take some pictures and if they come out bad take some more.