Most professional photographers out there put some sort of transparent-ish watermark on their images when posting them to the web. It’s one of the few, albeit not necessarily fool-proof, ways to keep your photos from being used without your authorization. For pros, this is important not only to protect the value of the work, but often because the photos are under exclusive use license… it’s bad for both the photographer and their clients if those photos are misused.

With services like Flickr making it so simple to “borrow” images from, unauthorized use is becoming more of a problem. I can name quite a few cases where Flickr photos with All Rights Reserved clearly indicated on the web page were taken and used in magazines or websites without permission. In fact, I just stumbled upon this post with an old image of mine that was used without my permission. As a result of this kind of issue, more and more people are tagging their images with a copyright notice, and sometimes even quite a big one.
Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

One common technique for still life and product photography is floating the subject on a background, usually a single color and often white or black. These images are then easily placed in catalogs or websites without having a whole square photo look. They seem to simply float on the page. (Somewhat ironically, my floating photo here doesn’t float, since my background isn’t white!)
Continue reading →

Sometimes, I have a set image in my head when I’m stooting… I know exactly where I want the negative space, how I want the focus and blur to appear, and where the shadows and highlights should pop. Sometimes, I just shoot, and see what I get taking the same shot with a variety of exposure and depth of field settings. Most of the time, I end up with at least one photo that has that magical combination of crisp and soft, color and texture, light and dark. But, there are times, like last week, where the shot with the composition I like isn’t quite right. Maybe the subject isn’t quite in focus or the lighting isn’t there. Another photo, has the right focus, but has mistakenly has a lens cap sneaking in from the side (How did that happen?). Luckily, with a few simple Photoshop compositing techniques, it’s simple to get the photo you are looking for. Continue reading →

I spend a lot of time fine tuning my images for my blog to get them to achieve the right balance of color and light. While it’s certainly not the hours that some professionals spend, it’s still probably the most time consuming part of food blogging for me (with the exception of some of the actual cooking). I want colors that are vivid, life-like or sometimes very subtle, to fit the mood I’m trying to achieve and I’m willing to tweak and futz with them until they are, in my eyes, just perfect.

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.
Continue reading →

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 number of photos will quickly get out of hand.

Here’s what I do, at a very high level, from start to finish:
Continue reading →

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 the exact data that the image sensor in your camera records, in essence they are the digital equivalent to your film camera’s negative. Really, they aren’t anything like a negative… film negatives are actual images even if they are reversed out. Raw files are scary math algorithms.
Continue reading →