Working with a Digital Technician
Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
Working with a Digital Technician
Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Getting Started in Professional Food PhotographySteve Hansen
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
Working with a Digital Technician
And we're going to move on to my digital tech, and he is the guy that makes this whole thing go. Without him, I would have no pictures come out of that camera. (laughs) This is Jack Hunter, my digital tech. Hi And he's a local to Seattle, and we work together on pretty much every major project. This is a luxury. This is a luxury that you can have when you start to move into full time professional. You really need to understand the camera, and how the programs work, how Photoshop works before you kind of make the jump to hiring a digital tech on a regular basis. What he handles- We're not going into gear yet. No way. (laughs) Stay away from that for right now. But what he handles is he's a certified Capture One- Is it certified Phase One or certified Capture One certified Capture One certified. Capture One is kind of like the Lightroom. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a program that really has sort of a commercial appeal. It has a lot of color corrections, and ...
things that you don't find in Lightroom as readily. It's also really stable in regards to tethering. It knows your camera. It doesn't have any issues typically, but I'm going to go to you for a few tips here, but when we do a set-up, he's there, I mean, Melina's in charge of talking to the client, doing the food styling, handling everything related to what goes in front of the camera, generally speaking, and his expertise lies in making sure files don't get lost, which is a big deal, and we're going to talk about how you can do this on your own, without having a digital tech, or when you're ready, why you would want one. So I'll kind of go to you. We have, for this shoot, we have my Nikon camera tethered. Tether shooting for food is crucial, because you have to see everything up close. When you're running and gunning, you're doing sports, you kind of know when to get the shot. You lock focus down. You get the action shot. You're good to go, and you have it backed up on your two cards in the camera. Here, we go straight in the camera into Caption One, and we'll have a live feed from our computer when we start shooting, so you can see our work flow, but he handles the backing up of the files in real time, so, what do we use for that? So we use a piece of software called Bvckup, B-V-C-K-U-P. It's a Windows software. Steve and I tend to work on Windows machines, because it's what we have history in. Doesn't really matter whether you use an Apple machine, a Windows machine, Lenox machine. It all works. I don't know what you'd use for Lenox, but I'm sure you can. But so we use this piece of software called Bvckup, and if you pull the computer feed onto the TV, you guys can take a look at it. I don't know if we can do that right now, but, so it's this software right here, and so what it lets us do is, it's actually a live copy from our shoot folder, where all of the files are coming off the camera onto this external drive here, so within about two seconds of taking a new photo, it will copy it onto that drive, and then we can, you know, if the computer catches on fire, we've got all our backups, and we have about three, four minutes of pulling out a spare computer and getting going again, but we don't lose any of the work we've done so far that day, so that's one of the two pieces of software we use the most. The other, as Steve was saying, is Capture One, which is, in my experience, the most stable software for connecting your computer to your camera. It transfers files fastest, and gives you a ton of ability to make the adjustments you need to make in computer as you go really quickly. Yeah, and if you're doing this at home, you can have a backup drive, and I use, you know, the Lacie drives, but you can use an SSD drive, which are really fast. We tether to the main desktop station when we're shooting professionally, and I have backups to backups to backups, and we have SSD drives, I think, four of them in that computer, and we backup to two different places. We'll have a primary drive, and then we'll have two backups so that if one catches on fire, or someone throws it out the window, it's all totally fine. You do not want to lose files for clients. That is a huge no-no. They do not like that, and they do not want to have to re-shoot, because some of these projects have tons of lee time, and tons of post-production. You don't have time to reschedule a shoot. They do not have time for that at all, so losing files is not an option. I'll bring a drive home, typically after a major shoot. Yeah, that's what I was going to mention is it's really good to always, no matter how many drives you've got internal to your computer, be backing up to an external hard drive, because you want to take it with you off set every night. If you've got a three day shoot, you bring that backup drive home with you every night, or you put it, you just have it somewhere disconnected from your main system, so that if anything were to happen to that main computer or to that location, you've got your files backed up.
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