Food Photography Portfolio Tips
Lesson 16 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
Food Photography Portfolio Tips
Lesson 16 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
Lesson Info
16. Food Photography Portfolio Tips
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
Food Photography Portfolio Tips
So I've been really working towards creating an experience, not just showing just my work and saying, hey, I'm good, hire me, but an experience in my portfolio. I'm looking at every little detail and combining more images, and, you know, with my first portfolios, they were very much about just the image, so I actually shot horizontally to fit the page so it's one image per page. And each image would feed off each other that was on the left and the right. And I love big shots, so I had, you know, I got a larger, this is a frosted portfolio from Lost Luggage which is just down the street. They're very common, and I like them because I can change my logo and not regret paying so much for a custom portfolio. Now this is a logo I'm gonna stick with for a while, but I don't know that for sure. So, you never know. So I like ones that you can actually put an image behind and it'll come through. And my portfolio as of right now is very literal, but you know, and they feed off each other. The pr...
int stuff's, you know, dramatic. You can see all the sharpness. There's nowhere to hide, but then, my potential rep, who's just a legend in the business and a fantastic person, really kind of said, okay, we'll team up with you, but you've really gotta up your game in regards to the portfolio stuff. So, I worked on an iPad portfolio, and the iPad Pro came out, which is like an actual, reasonably sized iPad, perfect for portfolios. 'Cause the regular iPad is just, it's not quite big enough. And so this is almost the size of a, you know, a traditional small portfolio. But the resolution on the Pro is over 3,000 pixels wide. It's very good. So I just use an app called Portfolio. And let me see if I can get the, so it just starts off like this. And you'll go through, and you'll see images. The thing is you have to really, if you're gonna have images feed off each other, which is really the point to make the sum more than, the sum of, you know, the sum of its parts, however that goes. You can't do side by side shots on an iPad, so each image has to be, the image that follows has to really resonate or make sense, or even do smaller, you know, minute items that all feed off each other, or they're part of a series. That's really powerful, too. And the backlighting really helps stuff that's backlit. Like if you have a backlit photograph and you've put it on a backlit iPad, it's like double duty. It almost looks like it's coming out of the page. And this is the one, this is the image that I shot on accident with just my two hands and a camera on the timer. So you can get cool shots. This is one shot with no Photoshop. However, my other ones are very much not that way. This was just a luck shot. So just, you know, and the blacks are really deep. They're much deeper than paper, generally speaking. There's some glossy images that are a little bit more, you know, glossy papers that are a little bit more deep. But I have my four overhead shots. But what I'm noticing is I'm trying to, I have to have different portfolios for different, so if I go to an editorial meeting, which is rare, I'll have a separate portfolio on here for that person. Or if I know, so it's good to have multiple portfolios, which you can have, that are put together. I use InDesign to actually create the portfolio. So that's another thing you have to learn. But exporting it to a PDF is really, it's a really good way to work, and it's efficient. So, you know, there are some side by side vertical images. I didn't completely abandon that. But it's really, it's an effective tool, and this is all I brought to New York. This is all I had. So you travel light. You don't have to have this, which makes your bag all wonky, and you don't have to worry about it getting dirty or scratched. These are kind of going, I think with the iPad Pro, the size of it, I may travel a lot less with this 'cause people were so impressed with the colors you get out of this. This is the end result of a lot of these efforts, anyways. So if it's a formal meeting, I'll have this, and then I'll have two of these printed iPads which I'll pass around the room. And I have people just keep 'em. I have, there's an agency in Seattle that still has one of these, and they've had it for a couple months, and there's one, but they're people I really wanna work with, so I don't mind that they just keep these as almost really expensive mailers. But I will eventually get 'em back. But these are a good value. I mean, I just have a printer over there, and I do my own printing, so I have control over it. And that comes from my landscape photography days. So, you know, the skills I learned from getting a perfect print for fine art really helped me kind of create this and do it on my own and know what to look for. 'Cause it can be expensive if you have somebody print it. It can be like $600 just for the prints, if not more. Question. How do you determined the order of your images, and is that something you work on yourself, or do you get, maybe, someone to help you out on that? Yeah. The order, the image order, I start off with the best image I have, always. It's the first impression. Then I choose the last image, which is always the second best image I have. And I sort of, kind of, go up and then down as far as drama 'cause I do wanna show some shots of me just shooting wine bottles, 'cause people want that. So there will be shots that aren't, they're not all complete eye candy. Some are very, like, really well executed images that people want. So it kind of goes down in drama a little bit and then sort of down the middle, I start to put my third best image in the very middle to late middle. It's kind of like a song. Like, it starts off with a bang, and then kind of goes into the verse a little bit and then it finishes off with, like, two choruses, and then it ends. Bam, and it's done. Your work has to be good, but direct meetings are gold because you have their full attention, and even when, you know, I have photographers, in dealing with a rep, too, I have photographers who are repped and who are not repped. And they're equally as good, especially in the food world where it is kind of its own entity where I'm doing a lot of packaging, education, fine art print stuff. Advertising is only, like, a quarter of it. And I'd like it to be more. But you're married to a rep, and there's a certain percentage that they'll be receiving from everything that you do whether you bring it in or not, generally speaking. So you have to be ready to make that leap, which I'm sort of getting to because I like the advertising side more, and I, they have such a, many of them have such an amazing reputation in the business that people I've talked to in direct meetings have mentioned, you know, I really like this or this person or this person. There's only a small group of those agents who are just at the top of their game and who are really beloved in the industry, and to get in with them is helpful. But it depends what you want to do. If I want to do only packaging, I would have no need, not a huge need, for a rep. They're not always going after in house accounts like packaging or, and those do, those pay well, and they're fun. I like the constraints of a packaging shoot for some reason. It's weird. So, but when you meet with somebody in person, you're showcasing your work, you're discussing. They're getting to know you, and if you're repped, you have to also maintain that level of intensity in your marketing, regardless. It's not the end of marketing when they rep you. It's just the, you know, it's just the beginning. You have to actually really give 'em more than you were before because they're counting on you to make a splash in the industry, and you need to be ready to do that. So, we're on that cusp. We're ready to, it's a terrible pun, to make a splat, but, with liquids, especially. 'Cause I'm being known as kind of the liquids guy, which is, like, a double edged sword, 'cause now you're the liquids guy. And, we don't want liquids guy doing the packaging, so we can't have, you know, so, but they don't all see it that way, especially if you get to know people and tell 'em, so you have to prove that you can do just the bottle shots. 'Cause I've shown people who work with some major brands as far as liquor goes, they love that splash image, but they may not have hired me for something had I not had a basic bottle shot. 'Cause they're surprised, oh, you can do that, too. Well, I mean, well, as a photographer, I'm like, yeah, of course I can. It's like day one, you know, bottle photography. Which takes a lot of work to understand, and I'm still learning it, but I can do it. So you have to show that. You can't assume anything, so you have to have different elements in your portfolio that showcase different scenarios, like packaging scenarios, bottle shots, but all in your similar style, if that makes sense. Whereas mine's extremely high key, extremely low key, a lot of Krys lighting, drama, motion, splash. That's kinda it. And it's constantly being refined. So the in person meetings, you usually call, to get an in person meeting you kinda just have to be bold. You have to find the art buyer who just is in charge of sourcing photographers and, I tend to not do cold calls. They don't like that. If you call somebody out of the blue, and they're busy, and they have to take to you about your, I can see their, feel their hand shaking on the phone. Some like it, I don't know. I, it used to be where you would do a lot of cold calling. I just can't do that anymore 'cause I feel like it really makes you pushy and makes you, if they wanna work with you, they're gonna end up working with you at some point, I think, just via other efforts. So you can always call 'em up after you've worked with 'em, and say, hey. But I typically e-mail 'em. They will get back to me 'cause it's on their time that they can get back to me as opposed to forcing something on 'em. So it really helps to have an e-mail back and forth, but not these massive blasts. But the in person meetings are where I've gotten most of my work.
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