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Macro Mode with Food Photography

It's time for macro photography now, what better way to demonstrate to you all macro photography to show you how to shoot macro photos then to shoot food? All right, now let's talk about what we're going to be doing here, so to help us out, we have our good friend and professional chef james lee and james would basically be helping with cooking and also plating the food. So the food styling and everything okay, so we have james here to help out with that let's talk about our lighting setup and some of things you guys need to know from the photography standpoint. Probably the most important things to know is the actual lens that we're going to using for macro photography. A macro lens is based gonna allow us to focus in on our subject at very close range and the actual kit lenses that come in both of our cannon and nikon cameras and also other cameras and make and makes that are out there the kit lens that come with that actually pretty decent a macro photography, for example, this eigh...

teen fifty five lens it actually can focus at a range of about point eight feet, which is solid. I could be taking my shots from right here and at fifty five millimeters it's actually more like I don't know eighty, ninety millimeters on this camera because this is a one point six crop sensor camera so we're seeing a closer focal length then this actually is telling us is actually closer than fifty five this is beautiful because it allows us to get close and get these nice type focus shots on these kind of macro images now same thing with the nikon we can also use other linda's like their specialty macro lenses but they cost quite a bit more so again we want to try and do everything we can with just the basics that way if you do have say, a hundred millimeter at two point eight macro will you can get even more amazing macro images but even with our standard kit lenses in our standard camera, we're going to able to pull off really professional macro shots so remember that's a one big important thing is that focusing distance by the way if you're too close in the focusing distance the lenses simply just not going to focus okay? So you got to make sure you're behind that minimal focus distance and it will tell you typically right on the lens itself next we have two of the lenses here that are also great for macro photography, particularly on these two camera bodies because again they're cropped sensor bodies so we get a little bit of amplification on the vocal these are the fifty millimeters we have the fifth miller one point eight for both an icon and for the cannon we have our screams here we have just a standard scream and we have our five oh one reflecting on this side will be using the reflector toe add a little bit of light and hearing their l'm using the scream if we need to block any light or to soften light. Okay, so what we have here is a little well, we're going to call this our placeholder so we want to do is get everything ready, get our light and get our camera set up everything good to go with our placeholder images or placeholder subject and then we're gonna add in the food as soon as he plates it and we're going to shoot it as it's played it now what I have to do is choose how I want to shoot this okay? So little lights coming from the right side and again it creates a nice directional look to it it's not bad it's better than shooting it flat so instead what I want to do is actually shoot against the light. The problem, though, is if I go and do that right now if I shoot against the light most likely the flashes going pop back up and you saw that why? Because this side is becomes too dark were shooting from the shadow side, but what we do get when we shoot from the shadow side is a beautiful highlight along the outside of the food and that highlight is gonna add a lot of extra dimension into these images. We want to go for that, but what we need to do, we're going to shoot this way towards the light, but we're going to use a silver side reflector to fill that life back in. So essentially, what we're going to be doing is bringing out this silver reflector, and we're gonna bring this right over the light be careful not to hit any of these, and we're going to grab that light directly from the window and we're gonna fill it right back into the food. And what that will do is just create a nice bright light on the front is going to fill the shadows, but still the highlight on the back is going to be a little bit brighter. We're gonna get a beautiful highlight in the backside, okay, so already you guys can see exactly how this is gonna turn out. We're gonna we're gonna do is come around to the other side. We're going to get everything set up, all of our shot and everything ready and in place, and then we're just gonna wait for james to basically plate the food, so let's do that now. All right, so james is just finishing up on the details over there with the stakes were getting ready to play yet for good and we need to make sure we got our settings and everything all right now let's go ahead and bring the silver side up live is going to help me to hold the silver sight a reflector close we're going to bring this into phil I'm gonna show you some of the challenges we're going having when keeping it in the automated mac remote and generally automated nakamoto works great we're on the little flower mode and it works great when there's enough light in the scene but the problem is when there's not enough light it's gonna pop the flash up and you're going to see right now let me bring up the live you just you just can't see what's happening here's my focus area and even with the silversides reflector in when I go to fire, it popped the flash up. Okay, now with the flash it's not going to look good now, I could keep shooting this way. I could keep shooting in macro mode with automated mac remote and sometimes I'm going to get it to work without flash sometimes it's going to flash it's going to really irritating what I'm gonna do actually it's flip over to manual and just show you guys how I do it on my own and what I'll probably do too is let's. Go ahead and switch out to actually the fifty millimeter, one point eight lens, too, so we can actually dial down to a more shallow amateur if we want to, but let's, go ahead and dial in the setting that we want to use for this if I end up getting a lot of the background, then all adjusted from there, so I'm gonna go down to, you know, like, right around one, two hundred second is pretty song let's go ahead and bring up our history so we can see where we're at and the history you can see that our shadows, we still have a little bit of ways to go there, but our highlights are kind of peeking a little bit. So what I might do is good about one to video the second or just bring my aperture up, so maybe I'll shoot at two point eight because f to it is a little bit too shallow, at least for this macro shot. I want a little bit more depth of field next I'm just going, teo, we'll get out of the aperture menu, there we go and we're going to slow down the shutter a little bit to balance it out. And this is going right we're going to be at we're gonna also bring in the silver side the reflector to be right there to fill in that deep dark shadow and then we're gonna basically shoot our shot okay so we're ready to go we're gonna plate the steak right onto here we're going to set it up and then we're gonna go ahead and shoot it so let's do that now what I found that I realized that basically from this side and we're not getting enough light the light's coming straight at me our shadow is going to be on this side we need to reflect back in here okay so we're just gonna make a little modification instead of reflecting them this side where we have enough light because life kind of bouncing off the refrigerator everything is giving us a little light over here we need to bring the reflector on the left side and then we're good to go so let's just do that real quick let's bring the reflector over this sign now when you all are on the shoot I want to give you a little tip that always helps out make sure to keep your shooting and your thought process fluid throughout the shoot don't get stuck trying to make something work when you're shooting your sort of solving a problem solving a puzzle you're trying to arrive at that best light that best look that best everything just for that right image, and sometimes it really requires that you might change the lighting or the composition or whatever it is if something isn't working, do exactly what pie is done here and make adjustments. You should be constantly adjusting and fine tuning in every scene to get that perfect look. So take a shot, take a look at the image, fine tune it, adjust it and then keep shooting don't just rattle off a hundred shots thinking oh, I can fix that in post no, no, no. Take the time to get it right in camera and then you'll end up with a much better image for post production. I'm gonna go ahead and switch back to the eighteen fifty five because I think it'll let me get a little bit closer. But I do need to raise the esso, so we'll probably go up to four hundred eyes so on this camera, that should be okay. Let's. See? Okay, that looks gorgeous now. We're just waiting for our next play, which is almost done. Is it ready? Sweet. Okay, well, I'm gonna swap you out. Don't lose that. I want to eat it. Okay, so here we have something a little bit different this go around, we have a reflective surface here in the white and that's gonna present a little bit of challenge. The white plate is beautiful because we're gonna make the food pop, but check this out. I'm gonna take a quick shot here. I want you all to see basically what I'm saying. What I wanted to show you is just that we're picking up reflections anything white or anything silver or with a reflective surface is going to pick up reflections around it. So to control that since we're trying to control white reflections on a white service, well, I'm gonna use the white scrim. Okay, so, let's, bring this down for one second. We're still going to use this in just a second fill light in, but for now, what I want to do is actually bring out our scrim, and we're gonna hold this directly over the plate just like this. Now, with that in place, I could take the same shot, and you're going to notice that it roy really does a great job of mitigating these reflections. I do need to make a little bit of adjustment for light here. Okay, let's, just take that quick shot and you could see how much less reflection there isn't this shot now. Okay, so that's great, and what we want to do is we're probably bring this down really close to the food just so we get a nice kind of bright look on the food, it's going to create a really beautiful look, and I'm going to get in there and actually shoot the shot, so you're probably going to see me disappear underneath this, okay, we're going to the same lenses are eighteen to fifty five I'm going to go ahead and get in there. We're not getting in here tight like this, and then with my elbows on the table, I'm going to shoot this. Okay, so remember, slow shutter speed means take a couple extra shot. I have my highlight alert on right now, and it tells me that I don't have anything blown, so the image looks nice. It looks bright and beautiful, but we're ok because we haven't blown anything out, okay, so it looks kind of too bright, but that's, why we use the hist a gram that's. Why we use the highlight alert because this is a very high key scene that you're looking at. The stake was very kind of you, loki. It was very dark, so with a high key scene with a location wanna make sure we're using the history ram because otherwise well, we can't really tell where those tones are gonna live. Okay, from the from the screen, it looks like it's blown out. But in reality, it's actually not.