Food Photography

On Monday I spent the afternoon cooking 2 meals to be photographed to add to my food portfolio. The below images are some new food props I purchased on Sunday and the lighting set up used on Monday. For this food session I used 2 lights, front left and rear with a silver reflector on the right. Sorry about the quality of these images.

Here’s two finished images. Pork loin with maple paprika glaze with a warm spinach and bacon salad. The second image is creamy coriander and minted chicken.

Portfolio | Flickr | Facebook 

Lastolite Hotrod Strip Softbox Review

After attending Glyn’s workshop and seeing various examples of strip softboxes being used I decide that I MUST have a set.  As all my studio lights are Bowens so I first looked at their offerings. The Bowens Lumiair Strip 140 looks great, but at £230 each they were out of my price range especially as I wanted two.

The next option was the Lastolite Hotrod Strip Softbox with a Bowens ‘S’ type adapter. At around £130 each with the adapter I decide to purchase them. I especially liked how they came in small bag as I don’t have a lot of space to store equipment.

I’ve now been using them for a couple of months and overall I am pleased with them. Once you get used to bending the bars they can be assembled quickly. The light seems soft and even from them, however I am only using them for edge lighting to separate the model from the background for my composite work.

The only thing I don’t like is the ‘S’ type adapter which is a couple of millimeters too big for the softboxes which meant I had to find longer screws to fit the two items together and the adapter is also a couple of millimeters too big to lock into place on my Bowens studio lights. None of this is a Lastolite issue as the ‘S’ type adapter came from another company.

UPDATE – 25th June 2012

Just been emailed by the supplier about the Hotrods – They were not designed to be fitted to Bowens or any other studio lights. Doing so could result in a fire hazard as the fabric and plastic components are too close to the flash head. I would recommend that you do not continue to use them in the setup you have at the moment. We do specify they are for battery powered flashguns both in the brochure and on the website.

Creative Composting Workshop Review

One of my many goals this year is to improve my composting skills and luckily for me I came across Glyn’s site at the beginning of the year and signed up and attended the Character Portrait Workshop in January. This was such a great workshop when Glyn mentioned he was combining both shooting and Photoshop techniques from both his Character Portraits Workshop and Compositing Workshop into a new Creative Composting Workshop I signed up again straight away.

For this Workshop we had two models, Stuart the businessman and Dave Clayton (UK NAPP Evangelist) the boxer. We were giving plenty of time to photograph both models before we moved onto the Photoshop part of the Workshop.

During the Workshop Glyn covered how to set up the lights to optimise cut outs, why a gray background, camera settings, image workflow (double RAW), basic image retouching (eyes, skin etc), how to do cutouts, adding a new background and changing its colour, adding a spotlight and lots of other useful stuff to final the image.

Here’s a couple of my examples from both Workshops I have attended.

Please note the bottom two images were created after the Workshop using my own background and textures.

Here’s the link to Glyn’s blog and Workshop page. Workshops

If you want to learn composting skills I would highly recommend attending one of Glyn’s courses.

Portfolio | Facebook | Flickr

Behind the scenes

Taken by Tim of TA Craft Photography during Monday’s model session with Genise.

Full post coming very soon.

Portfolio | Facebook | Flickr