Today’s your last chance to enter yourself (or a deserving friend or colleague) in the Portfolio Makeover Contest.
The most deserving photographer gets a complete website makeover by designer Krystyn Heide (her work includes Cadillac & MTV) and a free .
Today’s the last day!
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Stop us if this sounds familiar:
You’re wandering around your favorite thrift store/ flea market/ crazy cat-lady neighbor’s attic and you find a great vintage camera.
You get all excited until you open the back and discover it only takes some bizarre outdated film that hasn’t been around since was voted People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” So you put it back, sigh, and daydream about that naughty naughty Taft.
But hark, dear reader: you can take digital pictures using that incredibly cool old camera. Combine your digital camera with your kitschy cam, and you’ll end up with some serious vintage-style awesome.
I’ve got a nice roundup here of food photography sources with a ton of great tips, tutorials, and videos for making food look tasty on camera. How seriously you take this probably depends to some extent on whether you’ve ever heard the term “food stylist.”
Last week felt like food photography week with several blogs posting about it. It was interesting timing for me because I’ve coincidentally been shooting a lot of for the past couple of weeks. I don’t have much to add tip-wise except this: it is more challenging than it looks.
If you’ve got food photo tips, please share them in the comments!
Photo credit, above right: (cc-by)
Tips, Tutorials, & Inspiration
, Photojojo.com
, Becks & Posh
, Shutterbug.com
, Cameraporn.net
, Photocritic.org
, Digital-photography-school.com
, O’Reilly
, 101 Cookbooks
, Flickr.com
Blogs
— The definitive food photography blog. Full of useful information, beautiful photos, and an active group of readers. Written by Lara Ferroni (), freelance food and lifestyle photographer. That’s one of her delicious looking photos to the right.
— Written by Lou Manna, a commercial food photographer and author of .
— Brought yo you by Lisa Golden Schroeder, a veteran food stylist and writer with 25 years experience in the food business.
— written by Nika Boyce, food and scientific photographer.
Videos
A lovely bit of slideshow inspiration from Matthew Noel.
The Art of Food Photography. “The business of food photography is really a business where it’s a collaboration with many people.”
Behind the scenes at Cottage Living magazine. “Robin our Food Stylist brings all the food and she and Kim and I and her assistant prep all the food and get it ready. So, it’s really a joint effort. Everyone works really hard to get this one perfect picture.”
The Food Photographer. A more amusing take on food photography. “That’s why, when I’m shooting food, I scream at it.”
Books
Buying these books from Amazon.com helps support Photodoto.
Capturing the perfect image requires a trained eye, finesse, and photographic skill. Digital Food Photography gives you the ingredients to cook up your own recipe for success-with professional lighting techniques, composition, food and prop styling, retouching, and tricks of the trade. You’ll learn how digital photography combines teamwork, creativity, and technology, and how to make money creating delectable works of photographic art.
You eat with your eyes first, and no one turns a photograph of food into a culinary masterpiece like a food stylist. Food Styling for Photographers is the next best thing to having renowned food stylist Linda Bellingham by your side. Linda has worked with clients Baskin Robbins Ice Cream, McDonalds, Tyson Foods, FritoLay, and many, many more. Jean Ann provides a seasoned photographers point of view with helpful tips throughout.
Acclaimed food writer and culinary producer Christopher Styler describes seven distinctive plating styles, from Minimalist to Naturalist to Dramatic, with several striking examples of every genre. Each plating suggestion is accompanied by clear instructions along with color photos of step-by-step techniques and finished plates. Complete with essays on plating from ten leading chefs and recipes for the dishes featured, this book is a work of art in itself–a must for the kitchen shelf.
Now, for the first time, Food Play compiles more than 300 of the very best images from a decade of astonishingly imaginative publishing. This compact collection will surprise and delight both fans of the series, and newcomers to the enchanting world of Food Play.
Let’s get to know each other a little better. To me, a beginner is someone who is just starting out or who doesn’t have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of photography (shutter speed, aperture, depth of field). We were all beginners once.
Intermediate photographers have mastered the basics and have started to explore more advanced topics like lighting and composition. Advanced photographers are at a stage where they are refining their craft and possibly specializing in specific disciplines.
How would you classify yourself as a photographer?
The Arizona Highways Photography Guide was written by the editors and contributors to magazine. It’s broken down into three parts of about 100 pages each: The Basics, Types of Photography, and Places for Photography. Read on for a short review and how you can get a free copy.
This book covers a broad range of photography topics and, while it doesn’t go very deeply into any of them, it does provide a lot of very practical information. Every single page is filled with beautiful color photos that are used to illustrate a point and are each accompanied by a useful tip.
For example, page 40 includes this tip under a photo of a fast-moving motorcyle rider: “By using a slow enough shutter speed and panning with the motocross rider’s movement, the photographer was able to blur the background to heighten the sense of speed,” and it includes the shutter speed, ISO, and aperture settings.
Page 78 discusses depth of field and hyperfocal distances with helpful and clear diagrams. The tip on page 138 explains how color plays an important role in the composition of a photo of a bobcat at the top of the page.
The last third of the book is arguably the real “meat” and is comprised of photo essays that guide potential photographers through a number of interesting locations around Arizona. Each location is described in detail with accompanying photographs and plenty of tips for shooting features specific to that area. The Places for Photography section covers the Grand Canyon, Colorado Plateau, Navajoland, Red Rock Country, Mountain Country, Sonoran Desert, and Sky Islands. It also includes driving directions and websites for many of the places discussed in the essays.
The book is definitely geared more towards beginning and new-to-digital photographers and photographers who are interested in capturing the beauty of some of Arizona’s scenic landmarks. The breadth of subjects in the first 2/3 of the book serves as a brief introduction to a number of interesting topics but doesn’t cover any of them in enough depth to be particularly useful to intermediate or advanced photographers (the section on composition, for example, is mostly photos with just 2 pages of text). If I were writing a guide book I’d probably leave the basics of photography section out.
I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for tips on photographing the locations mentioned above. But there are many other books that do a better job introducing basic and intermediate photography (my favorite is by Bryan Peterson).
If you’re interested in buying this book, please consider supporting Photodoto.com by purchasing it through our Amazon affiliate links on this page.
Have you read this book? Share your opinion in the comments below.
I’m giving away my slightly used review copy. If you think you can put the information in the guide to good use, leave a comment with your answer to this question: what is the length of the Grand Canyon? I’ll contact the respondent with the first correct answer to arrange shipping.
Photos posted in this category are selected from the contributions of members of the . There are over 10,000 photos in the pool now! I think you’ll find it’s a unique source of inspiration. Click any of the photos below to view it larger and see more from that photographer.
The focus selector switch on my Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8D cracked and broke off. Somewhat bummed out. That’s not a cheap lens and, although the repair should be trivial, I have a feeling it’s not going to be inexpensive either. Sigh. Nobody ever said photography was a cheap hobby, right? At least the lens itself is still in perfect working condition. Anyone know of a way to repair this other than sending it in to Nikon?
It seems like online photo editors have been popping up everywhere. Check out our reviews of and the recently released . They seem like a good idea but do you actually use one?
Adobe has finally opened up the , the long-awaited online version of Adobe Photoshop. I’ve just finished running it through it’s paces and I am impressed.
Photoshop express requires registration to use. You get access to the online editing tool and a relatively meager 2 GB of space for photos at a custom URL which you can organize into a slick public gallery and slideshows. It won’t replace dedicated photo sharing like Flickr (no comments, limited interaction) but for casual users just being able to share a few albums and slideshows may be enough. By default, photos you upload to the service are private until you move them into your public gallery.
The interface should be immediately familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Lightroom. The default view of your photos mimics Lightroom’s browse mode and even includes the ability to rate and caption your uploads. Unfortunately it does not support RAW editing. That would have been killer.
Editing is also very much like Lightroom. Unlike Photoshop, it does not support layers, masking, or really any of the features that make Photoshop, well, Photoshop. It does provide easy, one-click access to the most used functions for everyday usage: cropping, red-eye removal, saturation, white balance, sharpening, etc. It also provides a version of the healing brush and highlight and fill light correction. Effects include black and white conversion, cutouts, color adjustments, sketch filter, and distortion.
Undo works similarly to Picasa where you can undo a specific effect or action. As you make changes, checkboxes appear next to the tool you used that allow you to toggle the change on or off. It’s not quite “undo” but it works well enough.
Adding photos to the service is easy. You can upload from your own computer or pull photos from your Facebook, Photobucket, or Picasa account. Flickr was conspicuously missing. Only JPG photos are supported.
Overall, Photoshop Express is an impressive and polished service. It is positioned to become the “gateway drug” to the entire family of Photoshop products. It won’t replace Photoshop, and it would have been more appropriate to name it Lightroom Express, but it does most things that casual users need. Only time will tell if it can succeed against competitors like and .
We all knew this day would come sooner or later, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting, does it?
Today, Adobe releases Photoshop Express for the web.
Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser. Not nearly.
No layers here, no fancy pants masking. But for 95% of your photos, it offers pretty much all you need to fix ‘em up, and it does it with style.
Whether adjusting exposure, white balance, or hue, touching up blemishes, or distorting your image, Photoshop Express provides an easy slider and thumbnails to give you an instant preview of your image at various settings. Even undo is better than you’d expect.
Being on the web, this Photoshop’s made for sharing. Everyone gets their own URL at photoshop.com, and the slideshows are top-notch — big, beautiful images with classy transitions. Want to load in and edit photos from Picasa, Photobucket, or Facebook? No problemo.
No, it’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it is a remarkably slick and well-designed basic photo-editing and sharing application. Arguably the best so far.
Today’s your last chance to enter yourself (or a deserving friend or colleague) in the Portfolio Makeover Contest.
Adobe has finally opened up the , the long-awaited online version of Adobe Photoshop. I’ve just finished running it through it’s paces and I am impressed.
