Shooting Food Shots At Home

Using Colored Gels with Your Lighting Gear
Visit any professional product or food photography studio and you'll quickly discover that within the bag of tricks used to create authentic mood lighting, colored gels are the ones most reached for.

After all, the tint of light in natural conditions can vary significantly, depending on the particular setting and time of day, so it is therefore advantageous for a photographer to be able to add tint to their artificial lighting gear to replicate light that occurs naturally.

There are many different types and brands of gel, but some of the more common ones used are the warming and cooling gels. CTB (Color Temperature Blue) and CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gels are produced in various densities, ranging from 1/8th density to full density.

Typically, a sheet of gel is rigged just over the source of the light to modify its color. Studio photographers typically cut up various-sized strips of CTB and CTO gels to place over their strobe heads. If you want a strong color shift, you'd affix either a high-density gel or wide gel (or both) over the light with gaffer's tape. (You'll see this later on in the lesson.)

Here is a shot of a drawer full of CTO gels, taken at a local theater lighting supply store (figure 1).

Figure 1

The Fruit Bowl
After picking up a few gels, we stopped off at a local grocery store to pick up some ingredients for a fruit bowl concept shot. Our idea was to cut a cantaloupe in half and use it as the breakfast bowl for various fruits. (Note that if you're planning to do a food shot, it typically pays to scout around for the freshest looking food available.)

We came back to the house with two cantaloupes, a honeydew melon, some blueberries, some fresh mint for a garnish, some lemons (brushing lemon juice on cut fruit helps to keep it looking fresh long after it's been cut), and a melon baller (figure 2).

Here, you can see the final stages of our fruit bowl coming together in the kitchen (figure 3).

Creating the Makeshift Studio
We knew that we wanted to control the lighting as much as possible, so we decided to block out the window light in the dining room with dark flannel sheets (figure 4).

As you'll soon see, you don't need a lot of room to create a makeshift shooting space.

Once the windows were covered, we decided to use a large cutting block as the surface and then made an arrangement with the fruit bowls and cloth napkin (figure 5).

Once everything looked good through the frame, we activated the built-in flash of the camera and took a shot on AUTO mode (figure 6).

The result, although fairly well exposed in the foreground, is not very exciting with respect to lighting. We wanted the shot to look as though it was taken in early morning light, but this result looks more like it was taken with a flashlight in the middle of the night!

Creating the Backlight
Next, we disabled the built-in flash and set up a Photoflex Medium StarFlash Kit. This soft light would serve as our backlight, or window light (figure 7).

Once we synced the strobe up with the camera, we took a shot to see how this light would look. Remember, when working on a studio shot like this, it's always good to build the shot one light at a time (figure 8).

What a difference from the previous shot! Although the foreground was too dark in shadow, the background was looking much more like a sunlit scene. It wasn't exactly where we wanted it to be, but it was a good start.

Adding a Hard Light for Texture
As we reviewed the result, we knew that we wanted to pick up some more texture in the fruit. So, we decided to add another light, only this time without the soft box attached. We mounted a Photoflex StarFlash 300 with reflector to a LiteStand, raised it a little over six feet, positioned it toward the rear of the set, and angled the head to face the fruit bowl (figure 9).

Once everything was in position, we took another shot (figure 10).

This hard light definitely helped to pick some more texture in the fruit, but we also noticed that we were getting some flare in the lens from the hard light, as the foreground looked somewhat washed out.

Eliminating Flare
To eliminate the flare, we attached a Photoflex 12" Black/Silver LiteDisc to a LiteDisc Holder and LiteStand and positioned it between the hard light and the lens (figures 11 & 12).

After our next exposure, we saw that this LiteDisc "gobo" ("go between") worked perfectly to eliminate the flare (figure 13).

Next, it was time to focus on the foreground lighting of the shot.

Figure 13

The Ceiling Bounce Fill
We knew that we wanted to maintain a backlit feel to the shot and were hesitant to fill in the foreground too much. If we had lit the front area with another soft box, we knew it would have looked dimensionally flat and uninteresting. So instead, we decided to add another StarFlash kit to the mix, only this time we'd utilize the ceiling to provide a broad, indirect fill (figure 14).

With this third light on low power, we took another shot (figure 15).

The ceiling bounce fill we added was effective, but subtle. We wanted to add a little more light to the foreground, but first we wanted to see how the overall shot would look with the background slightly darker.

So, we placed a piece of white foam core at the end of the cutting board, in between the fruit bowl and the rear soft box, and took another shot (figures 16 & 17).

Reflecting and Diffusing Light
The foam core definitely darkened the rear section of the shot, but we thought it was a little too severe. So, we decided to soften the edge of the shadow by diffusing it with a Translucent LiteDisc.

We also realized that the dark shadow in the back did not make the foreground pop as much as we thought it might, so before the set up the Translucent LiteDisc, we set up a 12" White/Silver LiteDisc (Silver side facing) toward the front of the set. Once clamped to another LiteDisc Holder and LiteStand, we angled it so that it would bounce light from the rear hard light into the shadow areas of the fruit bowl (figure 18).

Then, we simply attached the hand strap of a 22" Translucent LiteDisc to the top of a LiteStand and positioned it so that it would feather the area of hard light illuminating the background (figure 19).

Once everything was in position, we took another shot.

Notice the difference these two LiteDiscs have made. The rear Translucent LiteDisc has greatly smoothed the background shadow and the Silver LiteDisc has thrown a nice amount of light into the front of the fruit bowl. And even though we've brightened the foreground, the shot still comes across as being backlit, which is what we wanted to maintain.

Figure 20

Creating Dappled Light
Next, we decided to add some dappled light to the background, as though the sun was shining through the trees onto our scene. Although you can cut random leaf shapes out of a sheet of foam core to create dappled light, you can also just place plants in front of your hard lights for a similar effect, which is what we did here.

We placed a couple of houseplants on some side tables, lowered the Translucent LiteDisc slightly and took another shot (figures 21, 22 & 23).

As you can see, the dappled light really helped to make the scene look more authentic.

The only thing we wanted to do now was to adjust the color of the hard light with gels to better emulate warm sunlight in the morning.

Figure 23

Warming Up the Hard Light
We took a 3-inch wide strip of 3/4 density CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel and gaffer-taped it to the head of the rear hard light (figure 24).

Once everything was in position, we touched up the fruit with a little more lemon juice to make it look super fresh and took our final shot (figure 25).

As you can see from the final result, the warm gel accompanied the dappled lighting perfectly to simulate early morning sunshine.

Using Blue Gels for an Alternative Look
After we finished with this shot, we decided to play around with an alternate camera angle, lighting set-up and different gels. Primarily, we wanted to try and get more blue out of the blueberries.

So, we decided to add CTB (Color Temperature Blue) gels to the soft box that bounced light off the ceiling to simulate reflections from a blue sky. This time, we took two 3-inch wide strips of 3/4 density CTB and gaffer-taped them over the strobe head, inside the soft box (figures 26, 27 & 28).

We then came in a little tighter with the camera, turned off the hard light and replaced the foreground napkin with a light blue one to help accentuate the blueberries. Once we had everything where we wanted it, we took a final shot (figure 29).

As you can see, there's a big difference in the feel of this shot compared to the previous final. The blueberries now appear to be reflecting blue sky, and the overall scene seems more to be in cool shade than in dappled sunlight.

Remember, gels should be used to help accentuate the mood of your food shots, but not to overpower them. With a little practice of lighting and gel use, you'll be creating pro-level food shots in no time. Most importantly, though, remember to experiment and have fun!