Class Introduction: Getting Started in Professional Food Photography
Lesson 1 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
Class Introduction: Getting Started in Professional Food Photography
Lesson 1 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
Lesson Info
1. Class Introduction: Getting Started in Professional Food Photography
Lessons
Class Introduction: Getting Started in Professional Food Photography
05:57 2Tour of a Modern Food Photography Studio
04:37 3Prop Styling with Malina Lopez
06:03 4Food Styling with Steve & Malina
03:28 5Working with a Digital Technician
05:19 6Food Photography Gear
24:29 7Why Use Natural Light?
08:01 8Natural Light Food Shoot Prep
30:23Food Photo Tools & Tricks
02:30 10Capturing Food in Natural Light
06:54 11Natural Light Shoot Final Touches
19:50 12Shooting For a Client
07:24 13LED Lighting Overview
08:51 14Prep for Oven Shoot with LED Lights
10:36 15Food Photography Print Marketing
04:49 16Food Photography Portfolio Tips
09:14 17Pricing and Negotiating for Food Photography
12:13 18Final Food Photo Career Advice
03:01Lesson Info
Class Introduction: Getting Started in Professional Food Photography
I started off as a chef, and I'm going to push this. I know Chase Jarvis from CreativeLive did a post, a video post the other day, about where, how he talked about how he looks at other artists for inspiration. Not just photographers. He looks to everything beyond for inspiration, resetting himself and looking for new inspiration in oil paintings, and in music. That's what I'd recommend people do early on in their careers. If there's something that you know how to do, if you've played baseball semi-professionally or something, or if you already know the sport, and you know what's gonna happen, you can follow the sport. You'll almost immediately be able to transfer that to your current photography career, and be really good at it. I started off as a chef. I worked in Seattle, at the Flying Fish campania. I was the pastry chef at the Herbfarm for a couple of years. And then I worked in New York as well, at Restaurant Daniel, and some other restaurants, kinda worked my way up. That's what...
I wanted to be when I was younger. I was like, I have to be a chef I have to get at a restaurant, and there was this path that you go on, and then eventually I felt, you know, I was an oil painter when I was a kid, and I love two dimensional mediums, I loved art, in general. How do I transfer that to a potentially new career? And I started off, I became a private chef. I'm like, well, I want to leave the kitchen, that's not necessarily the way I want to go anymore. So I became a private chef, cooking for families. And I started, I was flying around the country with them, in their jet, and it was a fantastic job, and we lived in San Francisco, and I was able to get out and shoot landscapes. And this is kinda where I started with my career. There's an image back in the studio that I had printed. So I specialized in panoramic landscape photography. So a very specific niche, with a very specific look. And I didn't really stray from that look, it was high contrast, highly saturated, and that kinda translated into how I shoot food. A lot of dramatic edge lighting, like, there's a sunset coming in, a lot of high contrast, a lot of color. I'm not a very ethereal photographer. I don't shoot shallow depth of field. Typically, unless the client asks for it, but I've been able to kind of carve out a style. I love to see textures, and I love to see the foreground and the background. And I kinda love to create raking light, and I'll show you how to kind of achieve this style, and also, kinda how to push it in your direction. Because when I was, when I was coming up, and I was creating these images, with just these really raking light, I thought it was the first to ever pursue sort of like, how you would light an athlete and translate that to food, like with a lot of like, back edge lighting. Um, and I was wrong. I found a photographer, who I met for the first time last week, who's amazing. And he does a very similar thing. So I kinda had to veer off and do my own thing. And I made that decision as a business decision, and a creative one. So it's not just creative decisions. You have to see where you fit in the market, and I'm going to be specifically covering how to go about that. So what are we gonna learn in this class? How are we gonna get there? I want to really give you, there's a lot of classes that just kind of show how to do something, and we're going to do that, but I really want to translate that into how do I develop my own personal style to stand out. I'm going to go over that over and over again, because it's the crucial element of this class to get across. Kind of pushing the photographic boundaries, doing what hasn't been done before, and I know everything's kind of been done before, but there's always something a little extra to bring to the table. And if you want to become a food slash advertising photographer, and not necessarily an editorial photographer, if you really want to go into commercial side of things, this is key. You have to make, you have to do a lot of test shoots. You have to shoot on your own a lot. And you have to not only make decisions that are artistically good for your business, but also, just good for marketing and good for... you need to know, where you fit in. You need to study your competition, and you kind of need to form a style that fits. 'Cause if I were to do, if I were to do sort of, you know, really ethereal, natural light photography, I wouldn't do it as well as some of the people, even in this town were fantastic at it. I just wouldn't fit. It would just, I would just be another natural light food photographer, whereas there's, there's already who are, who have just completely mastered it. And I just didn't master it enough to focus solely on natural light. It takes a lot of knowledge to harness natural light, 'cause it, it just changed. (chuckles) It went, it went from, it went from cloudy to sunny, and if you're not ready for that, you'd better be ready for that. And I'm going to go over the business side, how to run your business, how to not go out of business, how to not grow too fast. I feel like we've been on a path where there's steady, been steady growth over the last four or five years that I've been doing this. And we're not over exerting ourselves, or over stretching our boundaries, if you will. There are photographers, I know, that have two studios, but they've been doing it for a long, long time, 20 years. That can be helpful, but it's a lot to maintain. So I kind of go over when do you need a studio? Is it important, do you even need one? And kind of just navigating your career. I mean, you're all in different areas in your professional career right now. Where do you, where do you go... And just kind of the pitfalls that I had, and the mistakes that I made, I think would be a lot of value to you, and to the, all the viewers. So I really, and don't be afraid to kind of chime in with any questions regarding pricing. We'll get into that, but you know, when the time comes, I'm going to cover price and I'm going to cover, I'm going to be annoyingly vague about it, but for a good reason. I'm not going to give standard pricing, 'cause there is no standard pricing. But by the end of it, you'll at least know, okay, this is the research I can do, and I can provide a good estimate that makes sense, and get jobs.
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