If you follow the general photography scene, it’s a bit hard to miss all of the recent photos that use a Photoshopped “tilt-shift” effect to make life size objects look miniature. Flickr has over 2800 photos tagged with tiltshift as well as 30 semi-related groups. The effect is actually very easy to achieve, once you [...]

Culinary Communion in West Seattle offers this new series course starting in late May. Each Monday evening for 4 weeks, students will gather to learn the key to restaurant food styling with Chef Hope Sandler.
Techniques covered will include:

Filo dough techniques: purse, strudel, cup, fettuccine, shard, pillow, tart
Wonton skin techniques, noodle baskets, potato maxims, crispy [...]

Most of my food photography attempts to make the food look irresistibly edible. Sometimes, though, it’s more fun to simply make art. One of my favorite discoveries is when I capture a truly human moment in the food. Sometimes, it’s planned, like in these pears.

I am not a person who gets excited by gear. In fact, gear often deters me from even getting into a hobby in the first place. When I began to learn to rock climb, all I ever wanted to do was slap on the shoes, and boulder around… the idea of knots and ropes and [...]

Heidi, from 101 Cookbooks, has posted a very cool article on using High Dynamic Range (HDR) for food photography. Cameras, or in fact, the human eye, can only see a certain range of tonal values. Remember the histogram? You can move the tones around, but as you move one end, the other end moves too. [...]

Delores Custer will be teaching several rounds of her food styling class in New York at Hyde Park (June 5-9 and Sept 18-22). In addition to studying prop selection, learning to deal with difficult foods, reading layouts and storyboards, you’ll spend a day in the studio with a CIA staff photographer, and receive a photograph [...]

I used to think a lot about user photography workflow… back in the day when I was designing software. The funny thing is, I knew lots of best practices, but never really put them into practice myself. Now that I’m shooting 30 to 200 photos a day though, a system becomes necessary or the sheer [...]

Folks in the Bay area look like they are in for a treat with this panel talk/discussion from some cookbooking legends, including Christopher Hirsheimer. Learn all about producing a cookbook, from conceptualization to publishing. It’s just $12 for members ($19 for non-members) at the Ferry Building. For more information (not to mention a lot of [...]

Sorry. It’s a terrible pun. It’s even worse, because I have to explain. Food photography. Raw files. Yes, it’s OK that you are grimacing. I am too.
I briefly touched on Raw files in one of my last posts and some of you may not be familiar with what, exactly, that means.
Raw files are [...]

Studio lighting is a science as well as an art. After picking up several books on the subject, I’m starting to get used to some of the terms like bounce and snoot… but I’ve still got a long way to go, there is so much to take in.
Let’s start with the somewhat obvious. Different [...]