Archive for November, 2008

The last three posts were all about choosing the right digital camera for photographing food.  Despite that, we all know that what you do with the equipment is the important part.  Here, I present a pretty simple set of steps for making decent blogworthy photos from whatever camera you have.  Some steps refer specifically to features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Windows (currently in version 7 for Windows and some other version for Mac), which I recommend highly.  It’s not nearly as full-featured as the CS version, but it’s more than sufficient for our purposes, and it even has some convenient “auto” features not found in the professional product.  I have both, but use Elements almost exclusively for my blog photos.

Here’s a sample photo of a succulent duck leg from J’s kitchen with turnip puree, potato threads, onion strings, wild rice crispies, broccoli rabe and a veal sauce.  It’s fresh from the camera, unchanged except for resizing.

(A quick note on reszing: know how big in pixels you want your picture to be ahead of time, it’ll save you some hassle and grief.)

First thing I do is crop the photo.  Sometimes it was perfectly composed in the camera, but not often.  I’m a stickler for keeping the original aspect ratio, but that’s up to you.  Here it is cropped in just a bit.  This is also a good time to resize to your final desired dimensions.

Next, basic color and contrast correction.  If you really want to, you can adjust a lot of different things separately, but in Photoshop Elements, I usually just use “auto smart fix” which is sufficient in the majority of cases.  I’ll talk another time about advanced color repair for those candle-lit shots.

The change is subtle in this case, but you can see some change in the white of the plate and the green of the broccoli.  The next step is a little vague, but here is where I touch up anything that still looks off.  Sometimes this means using the clone stamp tool to eradicate a stray grain of rice.  In this case, I used the burn tool to darken some of the distracting elements in the upper background, notably that lemon.

Almost there.  The final step (and its important that this be the last step in most cases) is to use the Auto Sharpen function.  Just to be clear, photoshop cannot actually sharpen a blurry photo, it’s just an approximation.  But I use this even if the image is already sharp (which is rare with low-light hand-held pics) because it brings up the highlights in wet and juicy textures common in food.  See for yourself.

Got it?  Don’t worry, I’ll review some of the tools at the end.  Here are slices of the above photos for some side-by-side comparison.  The final result isn’t far from the original, but you shouldn’t have to do a lot of post work just to get servicable blog photos.

1. Original photo
2. Crop and resize
3. Auto smart fix
4. Touch ups
5. Auto sharpen

That doesn’t look to hard, does it?  Here’s a screenshot showing the Enhance menu where most of the functions I refer to are located.

Good luck, and have fun with it!

If you’ve been following my turgid dissertation on choosing a compact digital camera for photographing food in restaurants, you know that we’re up to the final chapter on the camera part.

1. macro focusing or closeup mode (or “food mode”)
2. a wide angle lens
3. a “fast” lens
4. flash that’s easy to turn off (and stays off!)
5. ergonomics you like

Flash.

I dislike flash for lots of reasons, but for today’s discussion let’s just stipulate that it’s super-annoying to be dining in a nice restaurant (or even a lousy one) and have strobes going off around you.   For this reason, I have dedicated more than a little time and energy to figuring out how to photograph food in low-light situations without using flash.

So I recommend that you find a compact digital camera with one of two flash-constraining options:

1. A pop-up flash that has to be manually popped up.  This completely prevents accidental flashing.
-or-
2. A persistent flash setting.  This is a little harder to explain and even harder to find without trying the camera out.  We’re looking for a setting that turns the flash off, that’s easy.  But we’re also looking for a camera that remembers that you shut the flash off when you turn the camera off and then on again.  Again, that should minimize accidental blinding of fellow diners.

While I’m at it, I’ll just say that in my opinion, nearly all compact digicam flashes are too close to the lens and ill-suited to close-up work anyway.  Most of the time I find they totally blow out the plate.  Merlin Mann appears to agree.

Ergonomics.

This is harder to quantify, and for once, I’m not going to lecture you at length about my fiddly preferences.  You want a camera that you’re going to use.  One that’s easy and ideally fun to use, and one that produces results you’re happy with.

Some cameras have lots of buttons, some have very few.  Some come in pink.  Some have viewfinders, some don’t.  There are a lot of hard to quantify characteristics that contribute to usability, and many of them are very individual.  If at all possible, I recommend an extended test-drive to make sure the camera fits your hand, your eye and your mind as well as your budget and your pocket or purse.

Next time: quick photshop tricks for fixing up those low-light restaurant food pics…

Here we are on Black Friday.  Before you rush off to the temple of consumerism, please heed these tips on digital cameras, especially if you plan to be photographing food.  Today we’ll talk lenses.

1. macro focusing or closeup mode (or “food mode”)
2. a wide angle lens
3. a “fast” lens
4. flash that’s easy to turn off (and stays off!)
5. ergonomics you like

Wider is better

For whatever reason, the consumer camera industry puts a lot of attention on the long end of the zoom.  More telephoto must be better.  3x zoom!, 5x zoom!!  For my purposes, the other end is the important one – how does the lens perform for wide and close work?  Think about it – you’re sitting in a restaurant and want to photograph the plate in front of you. Do you have to stand up or take a step away from the table to get the whole plate in the frame?  If so, your lens isn’t wide enough.

In 35mm terms, most compact digital cameras have lenses that start at around 32-38mm focal length.  That’s on the wide side, but I strongly prefer 28 or even 24mm if possible.  If by chance you find one wider than that, be careful as wider lenses can make things look more distorted as they get super-wide.

But compact digital cameras are not 35mm, so unless they declare their “35mm equiv” lens dimensions, you are more or less on your own since there’s no single conversion factor.  Here’s my rule of thumb: look for six or less. If the tiny numbers on the front of the camera’s lens begin with a number lower than 6, it’s nice and wide.  For example, one camera I looked at has a lens marked 6.1-30.5mm f/2.8-4.5 and has a 28mm equivalent wide end.  Another has a 5.9mm lens that’s also listed as 28mm equivalent.

Another less well-known benefit of a wide lens, especially in low-light situations, is that it’s less sensitive to shaky hands than a longer lens.  Which leads us to the next lens tip…

Faster is better

“Faster” in this case is pretty archaic terminology, but trust me when I say that it means you can take better pictures in lower light.  How do you know how fast a lens is?  Let’s go back to the numbers on the lens, for example:

6.1-30.5mm f/2.8-4.5

This means that we’re looking at a zoom lens, one that goes from 6.1 to 30.5 mm in focal length, meaning the actual focal length, not necessarily the focal length in familiar 35mm terms.  The second set of numbers are the maximum aperture at those extremes – f/2.8 at the wide end, and f/4.5 at the telephoto end.  F/stop??  Don’t panic.  It’s just a number that says how big the hole that let light in is.  Bigger numbers after the f/ mean smaller holes.  Smaller numbers mean bigger holes, which also means faster.

Right.  Smaller numbers after the f/ are faster and better.  Since we’re generally most concerned with the wide end of things, I recommend worrying only about the first f/ number.  There’s no particular cutoff, but 2.8 is nice to have.  Numbers lower than that are rare on consumer cameras.  Numbers higher than 4.0 make me nervous – that means the camera lets in half as much light as one with f/2.8, and that can be a big difference when you’re only working with a candle in a dark bistro.  The second number will always be a good bit larger than the first on a zoom lens, so don’t panic if its up there.

So let’s summarize.  For best food photography, we’re looking for a camera with a lens with no more than 28mm equivalent wide end (or less than about 6mm in digicam terms) with an f/ number as low as we can find. The long end of the zoom won’t matter much shooting food, so don’t sweat it.  All of the above applies only to optical zoom.  Digital zoom doesn’t help the wide stuff, so ignore it.

In the unlikely event that you find a camera without a zoom lens – one that has just one focal length and just one f/number – I advise you to consider it seriously if the numbers are good.  Non-zoom lenses, or “primes” as they are sometimes called, almost always have superior optical properties to zoom lenses set to a similar length.  They focus closer and faster, when your’re photographing food in the wild, that’s what you need.

Next time, flashes and ergonomics…

Tomorrow is Black Friday, the official start of the most consumery time of year.  I hear that some stores will open at the stroke of midnight so those not who have not succumbed to tryptophan comas can begin their holiday shopping at the earliest possible instant.

Sometimes people ask me how I make the food photos on this blog.  There’s no single answer to that question, but I think I can provide some value for those shopping for foodie gifts by describing my ideal digital camera for photographing food.

Of course, if you mean to photograph food in your own home, you can bring in lights, set up a tripod, and strobe to your heart’s content.  I’m talking more about photographing food in the wild, in markets, on farms, in restaurants.  And that often means close quarters, poor lighting, and (at least in my case) a desire to avoid firing off a flash.

I don’t have experience many individual models (manufacturers are encouraged to send samples for review), so I will tick off some criteria and discuss them in the next couple of posts.  After that, I’ll talk a little about my quick and dirty photoshop techniques for food photos.

The limelist of desirable compact digital camera qualities for shooting food in restaurants:

1. macro focusing or closeup mode (or “food mode”)
2. a wide angle lens
3. a “fast” lens
4. flash that’s easy to turn off (and stays off!)
5. ergonomics you like

Let’s start with #1: macro mode. Just about all cameras have this these days, often under a single button with a flower on it.  Macro focusing lets you get as close as an inch or two from your subject, which is often desirable for that juicy succulent “food porn” look.  Too many beginners don’t get close enough to their subjects, and this feature helps force you to get in there, because once in macro mode, your camera probably won’t be able to focus more than a foot away.  Not unlike me without my glasses.

Some cameras have a dedicated “food mode” which is typically a combination of macro focusing and increased contrast or color saturation.  You can generally get these effects by twiddling settings or in post-production, but it can be nice to have the bundle of settings all in one place.

Next time, we’ll discuss lenses – why wider is better, why I hate zoom lenses, and how to read all those little numbers on the lens.

I recently helped a friend set up a blog. It’s a bit like turning somebody on to a drug – you know it’s bad for them and it’s going to eat up their life, but it’s already eaten yours, so why not share?  Over time, I’ve been “blogfather” to more than a couple of RSS feeds, some of which are in the duckroll blogroll at right.  Tonight I was rewarded with a wonderful dinner of thanks, and it’s only right that I should blog about it.

L took me to Great Bay in the Hotel Commonwealth, an excellent choice for many reasons, not least that she’s pesco-vegetarian. Great Bay – another awesome Michael Schlow joint – is in a beautiful space with a vaulted ceiling and a central sashimi station with a great lampshade-like canopy floating above it.  I recommend sitting at it if you can.  As is often the case, it was a bit dark for good photos, but I did the best I could with the meager candle.  Also note (excuses, excuses) that Great Bay’s online menu is a season or three behind what was served, so I don’t have all the precise details of ingredients.  I guess you’ll just have to check it out for yourself.

Service was attentive almost to the point of making us nervous, but they split both our soup and salad without complaint, and I’m sure we got more than the usual portion in total.  We started with a nice half bottle of Albariño from Lagar de Cevera, a salad with golden beets and candied pecans and a marvelous butternut squash bisque with perfect little scallops lurking just beneath the oil-dotted surface.

From the raw bar, we had Tasmanian salmon sashimi wrapped around crisp daikon with a topping that looked like tapenade but was actually black bean, rocoto pepper and lotus root for a nice zing.

Next up, two small plates as a main: lobster and shrimp dumplings with ginger soy and crab cake over corn salsa with a squirt of lime.  Despite the engaging and limey presentation, the crab cake was merely good, while the dumplings were more rustic in appearance but exceptionally tasty with a good dose of lobster meat.

Satisfied but not quite full, we walked through the hotel to the other end where we had coffee and superb dark chocolate cake with coffee buttercream at the bar of Eastern Standard.  As if having two great restaurants weren’t reason enough, I also love the Hotel Commonwealth because it hosts the Panopticon Gallery of Photography. Thanks to its hallway location, Panopticon never really closes and so might just be the art venue with the best hours in town.  We were lucky enough to see the new show – it doesn’t officially open until tomorrow with the reception on Friday – called Prohibition: Celebrating the Repeal, Photographs from the Collection of the Boston Public Library.  The show features modern prints of vintage photos from the BPL collection depicting life under prohibition and ties in with the 75th anniversary of repeal coming up on December 5.  In addition, images by Panopticon regulars Bradford Washburn, Karin Rosenthal, John Ponwall and Keith Johnson (among others) were on view.  Don’t miss it.

It seems goofy, but I’m thinking I should take a holiday in my own hometown and stay at the Commonweath.  When the weather gets cold, being able to see great photos and eat great food without going outside sounds pretty good.  Kenmore square has come a long way since I first moved here, that’s for sure.