Food Photography: Capturing Food in Your Kitchen

1. What is this Course?: Hi, I'm Will Carnahan. And I'm here with video school online and fill Epner to bring you a D i Y food photography course. I'm a professional photographers will a cinematographer. I've been around a lot of commercial food and other corporate videos and stuff like that. We want to create a course that will show you how to do D. I. Y. Food photography. This isn't for a big studio, big flash and light set up. This is for you at home to just pull. Resource is that you have at home or in a local craft store using natural light to make your food photography look super professional. We're going to start our lessons with picking up the ideal location in your house to shoot food. We're then gonna talk about settings and trying to bring out those accents and what kind of utensils to use for your style and your looking food. After that, we're going to go into lighting techniques, had a control Ambien and natural light. After that, we're gonna talk about cameras in the difference between iPhone and phone cameras, versus bigger professional and smaller mere lis cameras. And then we're also going to check out how to compose the best shot with your camera after all that's done and said, We're gonna go ahead and talk about how do naturally adit your food photography and have it be as natural, and it's crisp and vibrant as possible. So if you're ready, let's get started. 2. Choose a Location: So the first big thing is finding a location, and I'm gonna kind of jump ahead in food photography. What I've kind of learned and been taught and you'll hear this a lot is that lighting is king because we want to make this a D. I Y. Course, we're gonna focus on completely natural light. We're not going to use any artificial flashes or strobes or anything like that. So our location is very dependent on natural light. You don't wanna have really, really harsh shadows because you'll start to see differences and food and a look not as natural and appetizing and all that. So. A lot of food photography spitting on your style is done with very soft diffused light. Imagine the sun coming and really, really hard, and it's just really bright and creates his deep, deep shadow. Diffused light is like basically putting a white bed sheet in front of that son and and spreading the light out so it's nice and soft and easier on shadows. That being said, shooting inside is much easier than shooting outside where there's this harsh sun. Now again, what's easier and finding natural light is just finding a really nice window where there's light coming in. We want to find a window where we're going to get less hard light throughout the day. Now that being said where we are, we're in Southern California in Los Angeles and we would want to aim for kind of a north facing window because that will be a consistent light throughout the day. If we waste west, the lights gonna get brighter As the sun starts to set, It might start poking through if we face If we have a east facing window, we might start to lose light throughout the day as the sun kind of moves over depending where you are in the world. This may change on but also may change based on the weather and things like that. Today is kind of a cloudy day s o a lot of the light coming in tow. Phil's apartment is very diffused, so we kind of got lucky with that. But you kind of just want to be cautious. So I'm here in Phils Kitchen. Kitchen is obviously where you kind of want to start looking for your window, mostly because this is where the food's gonna be and you could potentially use the kitchen as a background A supposed to creating your own background, which might look nice later. So let's take a look. There's really only one big set of windows right here. They've got blinds in them. The sink is right here, which is kind of a bummer. I think of a sink weren't here. This might be a really nice spot to shoot. These don't open. It looks like because this is here. I also know that that's East. So if we start shooting this direction, I know that the sun is going to be moving away from us here, so it's gonna get darker as the day goes on. I'd like it to stay as consistent as possible. So there's a big window over there in the dining room area. So let's go check that. So this window is great. That was north, so we've got a north facing window. It's pretty big having a bigger sources. Nice little cover, a bigger area. The kitchen is back there, which I just came from so I can shoot from this way and have depth. Or if I wanted to, I can shoot from this way and create a background cloudy outside. We're in Southern California. Often. It's not that cloudy, but we got some nice diffuse light. If I wanted to defuse this more gonna hang up a sheet. So this is great. So let's get a table that we can now set in front of here at this height at the bottom of the window. And, uh, we can get started with our next left, so that's nice. 3. Design Your Food and Setting: Okay, so let's talk about prepping your food and your setting. The big thing here is to kind of make sure that your food doesn't look alone and we kind of busy it up with a story. And so that means, like accenting it, adding some depth when we start to shoot everything here we found at Phil's apartment. So that's a big thing for us today, right? We're just kind of using what's available without having to go out and spend money, but still creating something that looks nice. Your home. You may have a different style, so everything may look a little different. The big thing is to kind of find things that are gonna work with the dishes that you're gonna be showing. We're going to start with a bunch of different dishes. But for this, listen, we're gonna be making a salad shooting the salad throughout, and then we'll shoot a bunch of other stuff. So everything you see here is what will be using in most of our configurations. We may add some other things that we find. Let me show you some examples of what we've got here and what we found around the house. We found this nice wood cutting board that he's got. It's got some nice grain and texture along with the table we found. It is small table, but it's what we got. So we've got two types of wood that we can shoot on. In addition to that, we found some silverware that's very shiny. Maybe we'll make a milk shaker. Put a beer on it. Later, we found some limes and lemon that we can use to add some color to some of the shots. Depending. Maybe we'll do. Margarita, I don't know. Um, found some really cool looking wood coasters that we use. We can kind of spread these out. Maybe they'll be out of focus. On the key again is texture. We found these really cool salt pepper shakers. I found them there on his dining room table, but I think they have a nice shine to the light. You can kind of see how reflective they are. These air, some napkins that feel just had, ah, in his house again. It's something that you want to use that works cohesively with your story, and we're trying to tell, Okay, so let's get into setting our setting here. We've got our salad that Phil created with some toast on the side. Basically, we're going to place this down and figure out what looks the best around this particular food item for you playing at home. Go ahead and take your dish, whatever it may be, Um, and just try to basically design a world around it that tells a story and applies itself. Phil and I obviously not world renowned chefs. So what? The key thing to do here is just make your food look as presentable as possible. Um, and as clean as possible. So let's go ahead and figure this out. I'm gonna go ahead and place this down. I think we're going to stick with this Wood boards that really like the texture. Um, and let's see what makes sense here. We will take out the milkshake spoons and probably take out the knife. Um, right here. Obviously, the old women isn't really fitting as well, so let's take full limit and limes out. Save those for something else. Tomatoes look good. The oil and vinegar also look good again. I'm shooting this direction, the lights coming in this way and we want to create kind of a sense of background, a sense of texture, everything that we can do to kind of just tell a story, create an atmosphere and and just really kind of tryto accent everything that's happening on the dish itself, some using the kitchen as sort of a background but also using the setting as a background. We shoot from this angle. We don't have or need a background where, as we were shooting this angle, it just depends on the type of food that you're shooting the salad. It's little bit different. We'll get more into that. Compositions could pick out a little color here of napkin just to kind of set the scene. I think I'm going to go with this. I don't want to overpower the salad. The yellow would probably overpower it. This little more diffused. So let's let's go ahead and use that. Make it as presentable as as as possible. It looks nice. Then we'll take, uh, fork. Put it there and again. I don't want to focus on these things like they're going to be out of focus, but I just want to add atmosphere, story, um, make it look appetizing. This looks like a nice place where I could sit down and have a meal. So one thing real quick on the salad and the white dish, we kind of selected a white dish, and that's kind of typical practice. I mean, you can probably tell most professional restaurants are gonna be serving things on white dishes, really toe accent, the color of the food. And so it doesn't get lost in like a dark or black dish. The cool thing about this also is when we put it on our wood and put it in our setting. It really does separate the food itself from the background. It's kind of like having a white canvas with colorful painting. So white dishes air really nice, and they also look great with really diffused soft light. So again, the idea here is to create a photograph that's really going to be appetizing and kind of warm and inviting. You can see really quickly if I just pull some of this stuff to the side, just ah, plane plate. It's It's pretty like it's a nice salad, but it really isn't, you know, into not inviting. It's not like Hey, I come sit down for dinner and join us. Whereas as soon as I start to add things, it really is more of a setting place for you to kind of be invited, too, and have friends over. You know, it's sort of, Ah, nice invitation, sort of sort of thing. I know that's a little silly to say, but you can kind of tell This is much more inviting, more homey, less sterile. It's it's much more inviting. It's like, Hey, comes, sit down, enjoy it a nice meal And that's what you want to do with your photographs, right? You want them to be appetizing. You want them to be inviting. You want something to look at and be like, Yeah, I'd sit down and eat that salad So now you can see that all of this together in this nice storytelling atmosphere, it's more inviting. It's more. Sit down and enjoy this salad. There are plenty of other styles of of settings, you know. It could be, you know, would a different type of wood. It could be a different type of food. The idea here is to just create your style and have it be a za appetizing and as inviting as possible. So that's this lesson. We're gonna move on. Teoh had a light next 4. Light Your Food: so Lesson three is all about lighting. Now, lighting is really dependent on the kind of style that you're going for. For these purposes. We're going for a natural kind of inviting style, which is typically the norm. You can go into a darker, more contrast year, night life kind of style. But we're sticking to natural light and very soft light coming in. So in order to do that, we have our north facing window, which is right, gonna keep our light consistent all day, which is gonna let us shoot. We're not going to get any harsh lights coming in from the sun. Everything is diffused in this particular place. There's actually a white building outside there, and the sun's hitting it, which is bouncing even more light in. So for us, it's kind of nice having this really calm light on a cloudy day. Would be dust is nice and having some nice soft light, and we're gonna play with two different types of diffusion and two different types of bouncing light and negative. Phil. So let's start off with just the regular light that we got right now. Let's see what we got. So I'm gonna go ahead. Um, and we'll talk more about camera composition later. I'm gonna go ahead and take a shot. Right now I'm at a to eight. I s 0 400 I'm shooting at 125th of a second. We'll get more into camera stuff in the next lesson, but for now, here's our shot. It's a pretty nice, even lit soft light because of the window. Now let's add a sheet. What I'm gonna do is just a very basic again stuff that you confined in a house white bed sheet to diffuse the light even more. What I'm doing is just hanging it up to cover the entire window, and this is going to allow the light to still come in, but it's going to keep it softer. So now the let's diffused even even more. We're going to keep the same settings on our camera there. And so now you can see going back between the 21 is a little bit brighter. Has the shadows a little harsher. You can see under the plate and the other one, it's a little bit softer. It's also a little bit darker because we didn't adjust our shudder. We're just gonna open up a little bit with the shutter, take another shot. And now you can see the difference between the two. You can see they're still around the same brightness, but the light is a little bit more diffused and a little bit softer. Another thing that happens because of that she is The color temperature has changed just a little bit. And so you can correct that later. Or you can kind of decide what kind of lighting that you want. I think for this one I would probably go with the diffuse light because it just looks a little warmer. It looks a little softer. Looks more inviting. Is this a nice, a vibrant kind of idea? We want to add a little bit more contrast. I'm gonna add some neg fill, which means I'm gonna keep the light coming from over here and try and, like, shape some kind of darker sides on the contrast, decide on the right side and not allow for some more shape and more sort of contrast within the food itself. So for that, we went and bought a dollar black foam core on. Basically, it's really just to suck up the light coming from the other side of the room, depending on where you're shooting, there's no real close wall on that side for this light to bounce off of, so this isn't going to do much. But depending on where you are, you can take this and get it as close as you can to the food without actually getting it in your shot. And I'm just doing it by hand right now until I get into my frame and I'm gonna back out and I'm gonna go and take a photo with the same settings and take it away. And now you can look at your difference between photo and other photo. There's a little, little tiny bit of darkness in it that adds a little bit more contrast that I think looks a little bit more professional. Notice on the fork if you go back and forth. The fork has added this nice, dark layer of contrast and also adds a little bit more shadow coming in in the back, running on the napkin, which I think looks way more professional. So let's go ahead and figure out a way to fix that so we can take a real shop. So what do in house? I'm just using a chair that we have in the apartment to basically figure this out. And basically, this is around the spot that I put it at, and it's basically adding this contrast that we talked about. I'm going to get a piece of tape from here to here, and it's gonna lock it down. I'm gonna put that tape there. But that tape there, this is very, very d i y rudimentary. This thing's very light. A little piece of tape like this goes a long way, and now we take our shot and great so that darkness is still there. The contrast is still there compared to our shot beforehand, which is a little bit brighter and a little bit less contrast again. This is style preference. So another thing if you wanted to make it brighter is that you can add a bounce card depending on how much light is coming in. Basically, replace the black with a bounce white card toe. Add in some more like So the only reason I would use this is if we didn't have enough light coming in and you want to delight the front a little bit more. We're in a pretty ambient room, so it's gonna be kind of hard to show you this, But with the bounce card, you can kind of see that I would take this and try and bounce this light onto here to kind of add some more, some more brightness and some even lighting. So again, I'll put it right here and take a shower. This bounce card will basically fill out the shadows on the other side of the food, so it'll be less contrast. Um, or even this style is you know, something that you may like more than the contrast he style. But check it out. Look at how dark and contrast e it is with the black fill versus the positive white light coming in as the bounce card fills in. This is really just tools for you. If we were to take down the white sheet and use the bounce or change any sort of configuration, you'll be able to achieve different styles. So really playing around with that and finding what you like the most is really gonna help define your food photography and the way you like to shoot. So that's lighting was very basic. D i Y bounce and soft lighting very quick. I know if you have any questions, feel free to ask us, and we'll get back to you. We know when we want to what kind of cameras you're using right now. I've been using a mere list camera, but let's talk about iPhone and phone cameras versus professional and pro Sumer cameras. 5. Camera Options: Smartphone vs. Fancy Camera: Okay, So what kind of camera you're gonna be shooting your food with? I wanted to talk about this because I know a lot of people want to use their phones or their smaller cameras or their point and shoots. So I kind of wanted to talk about the difference between the two. Now, obviously, the quality of an iPhone or any sort of mobile phone will be different than a larger, more professional, pro sumer camera. The camera musing right now is a mere lis Fuji X T one with a 56 millimeter lens. I have right here an iPhone six plus on, and I just kind of wanted to show you the differences in Look, the big thing with professional looking photography is the depth of focus and the ability to control the exposure and see into contrast, basically, basically, seeing light versus dark with a lens and interchangeable lens, you're gonna be able to create that depth of focus much more easily than you would with a phone. Now, let's look really quick at the same compositional shot from a phone versus a mere lis camera. So you've already seen sort of our shots from Army airless cameras. Let's go ahead and take a shot again. Just so you have reference, this is with the black negative fill that we talked about in lighting over our salad that we created with our kind of look. Now let me move the mere list camera away, and then we'll go ahead and try and shoot the same shot with an iPhone. So if we stand right here right away, we can see were too wide. So we're gonna go ahead and zoom in and get the same similar shot that we had before Toronto and sacrificing the quality and the pixels of the camera on the phone because I'm zooming in so much. So let's zoom out and see if we get full frame and get closer. It's a little bit harder cause of our placement of our card, so I would move our card back. But let's just take a shot here for now, just to see, and we can crop it later so you can see it on the iPhone, The shots, pretty much all in focus. There's not a lot of depth of field. There's not a lot of shallowness, whereas the mere lis Fuji shot with the prime lens and the 2.8 aperture, which is it was just the aperture of the phone adds the step that focus that really looks more professional, more high quality, so you can create a great shot with your phone. You can also create an even better, more professional looking shot with a mere list or DSLR camera with an interchangeable lens . I feel like if you're trying to maximize that professional quality, look, you're gonna want to go with the photography camera, like the camera that's meant to do photos as opposed to a phone that has a camera on it. Other aspects of it would be the actual digital file megapixels on these cameras on the bigger professional cameras will get you more space in editing later, which we can talk about having looks into the shadows and pulling back the whites and all that versus a phone, which is much harder to have that dynamic range and be able to color and add it as much as possible. 6. Camera Settings (for people shooting with manual settings): So those of you who are using mere lis or DSLR cameras or camera where you can adjust manual settings, let me really quick just go over or the settings that I use for exposure. So the three settings that you always want to pay attention to and this is some basic photography R i s o aperture and shutter. So all of those air we're going to use to create the exposure that we want again exposure's gonna end up on your specific style and the lighting darker, if you like. Brighter if you like, depending on which way you're going. I eso is where we'll start. So depending on your camera, you may want to adjust your eyes. So and that meaning sensitivity of how sensitive your camera is to the light coming in. So I am gonna be able to shoot her on 204 100 with this camera, which is where I like the bummer part about I S O is if it's darker and you start bumping up your I s o, the grain is going to start coming up, which isn't always nice to look at. So depending on your camera, you want to a manias, so where you'll get enough light in. But you're also not see too much grain because that will start to look not as clean and a sharp. The next thing you want to look at is your f stop your aperture. Now this is kind of Ah, another style choice. It's probably one of the ones that I adjust the most. But the lower the F stop number, which means the bigger the whole that the light comes in, the more that will be out of focus. So if you shoot wide open, if your lens can open up to a 1.41 point two more, things will be out of focus unless things will be in focus. So if you're shooting food, I tend to aim around a 2.8 because I do like that nice soft background. I don't want to open up to a 1.4. This lens will go to a 1.2. It might be a little nutty, and some of the food might not end up in focus. You can kind of tell already that in our shot, the toast is totally out of focus. F stops really kind of where you want to look at as far as what's in focus on what's out of focus and your specific style. Again, I'm aiming for a to wait at eso 400. The third thing is the shutter. Now I kind of depends on what you're doing. It's nice to have a tripod because we can kind of aim at it and set up our composition and let it sit there and walk back and forth as opposed to bringing your hands up every time. So your shutter is really gonna be the one that you're adjusting the exposure to pick your eyes. So pick your F stop. Now pick your shutter, depending on if using a tripod or not, we've been shooting at 1/60 of a second, which is kind of slow, but because we're on a tripod were able to shoot as low and as high as we like, which gives us a lot of room to make decisions based on our I S O and R f Stop. If you're not on a tripod and you start to move, I'd say below 60 closer to 30 and even lower than that a second, you'll start to get some camera shake because it will start to see the motion of the light moving around. So it's safe to be on a tripod if you're gonna have those lower shutters and depending on how bright your window is, what time of day it is and where you are in the world. So all of these settings cannot necessarily be done with an iPhone, which is another major difference. Let's talk about the lens choice really quick. I'm using a prime lens. It's a 56 millimeter on a mere lis crop sensor, so, really, that's more like an 80 85 type of DSLR lens. I have to step back a little bit because it's not necessarily a macro lens. For detailed shots, you would want a sort of macro lens or a long lens where you can kind of zoom in and you can check that focus to get more detailed shots. We'll talk more about compositions in the next lesson. You can also use a 35 millimeter of 50 millimeter and 85 millimeter. Really, Just finding your style on what you got is the best way to go about these things. Kit lenses for Canon Zorn icons You can find a cheaper 35 millimeter 50 millimeter lens online on, and they look really great and add a lot of depth of field for your food photography. So if you don't have a mere list or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses, you can always shoot with your smartphone and still get a quality photo. You'll have more options with the bigger cameras, but you're always able to shoot with any camera you have. And the next lesson we're gonna aim at different compositions and how to position yourself to shoot your food. 7. Compose Your Shots: There's four major angles that I always try to shoot when I'm shooting food, there's this angle, which is kind of a 45 degree angle, which is always the one I end up using. There's a flat angle or more of like a hero shot that's more on the level of the food. So that's really going dependent on your background and then was getting really popular nowadays to is the overhead shot and we'll try those. And then there's also detail shots. So let's go ahead and start with a 45 degree angle shop. So here, I'm kind of just at my normal stance. I'm about 57 and I'm looking right at the food, and it's kind of exactly what we've been shooting. What you've seen, I'm gonna back up just a little bit. We've taken out our negative Phil so that we can kind of show you are compositions and you can see everything. So this is much more about compositionally got our settings going and let's snap away. So the cool thing about this shot is again. You've been watching this throughout the lessons, but you see kind of all the details, the background has really become really just the table itself, and we're focused on how you would normally sit at a table and eat. It looks a lot more appetizing, and it's a little more nice to people that they have seen this image before every day of their lives. So let's talk about kind of our hero shot. This is more on the level here. It's not gonna work as well for a salad, but check out these other shots where it's right on the level you're able to see more of the actual food itself because it's kind of protruding and not in a bowl or a plate. I'll show you with the salad. What we would normally do would be finding a background. And for us remember that kitchen in the background we're going to use that as kind of our were in the home, were in the kitchen, which is a great thing to do. If you don't have a background like a backdrop or like a wood plank or something, you do just use your kitchen or your house or something in the back room that will be way out of focus, so let's step back. We're gonna be on the level of the food. We're gonna get back to our normal settings, focus on our salad so you can see this is really incorporating our style and everything that we have in the background. We have a fork in our napkin and the food is front and center. We can see it. I think I might actually, for this rotate the toast and do it again because I want to be able to still see the toast and still gain that look. Right. So here the toast is rotated, weaken, See it a little bit better. And the food is right front and center. What a good looking salad. So now let's do the overhead shot. I'm still using my 56 millimeter on my crop sensor camera, and that's still around in 80 85. So I'm gonna get on a chair to see how high I get and see if I can still capture what I'm trying to get. If you have a zoom lens, you might be able just to get up here and zoom out a little bit. Um, if you have a bigger tripod, you might also be able achieve this Luckily, my screen pops out a little bit, so I'm able to just center. So the best thing to do is just our tables. A little small, so you can still see are kind of settings. There are toast ourselves there, take a shot, and I would probably add in some negative Phil or some bounce from my style. Um, and you could just pull that right up like we did before. I try to center the play as much as I can, because that's really the main focus of what we're trying to dio. There you go, and that's an overhead shot. You probably see these on Instagram a lot. It's getting a little bit more popular, and it's really nice because you really see the layout in the lines of everything. And most things are gonna be in focus because they're all in the same level, right? So check out these other shots with other foods. You can see how you can see the circles, the lines, It's appetizing. It's interesting. It kind of is a good menu item. So depending on what you're using with your food, you can show he's kind of anywhere. So for the fourth composition is detailed shots. Now this lens I've been using my 56 millimeter. I know. Right off the bat, it does not get me that close of focus. So I'm gonna change it to my kit lens, which is something you guys all probably got with your cameras. And this one's actually kind of a cheaper 55 to 18. This will allow me to get closer detailed shots. Now you can see the light keeps going in and out, and our video is having a little bit of trouble to because the sun is going in and out in those clouds. You just kind of have to stay on top of your game and pay attention to your settings and adjust accordingly. So let's get up close. Um, you can see already I'm losing some light, so I'm gonna I eso up or slow my shutter down a little bit just to achieve these detailed shots. And here, depending on what you're doing, I'm just gonna get a nice, close up shot of the food, the detail and everything I can the bread a swell. And you never know if you're shooting this for a client or If you're shooting it for a blawg or just to show on Instagram, you always want options to show. Sometimes want you for a client to I'll shoot the little the vinegar and oil or the fork or the tomatoes. Just stuff that really like kind of accents, the whole mood because you never know what you're gonna be using this for depending away you're doing. If you already know what you're using this for, you want to make sure to get those detailed shots and the shots you need specifically. All right, so that's all our compositions. Remember all 4 45 degrees hero overhead and details between those four. You should be able to cover your entire food for any reason or anything you need, Whether be menus, Blog's Instagram's just for fun, postcards, whatever you really need. So just remember to keep your options open, keep your eyes open and use your compositions in tandem with what we taught about lighting . Try to figure out where you want your composition to be, and then bring in that neg. Phil. Bring in that bounce guard and try and work around, and it's a delicate balance of finding that correct perfect shot 8. Edit Your Photos: everyone, this is Phil, the man behind the camera. For the rest of this course Today, I'm going to walk you through editing your food photography. I'm going to try to simplify it as much as possible so that whatever photo editing software you're using, you'll be able to understand the three key points in the three key things to do with your photos. I basically pare it down to crop color and exposure. So with cropping, we're just going to adjust the way that the photo is composed. Using cropping with color. We're going to change the saturation of our food to make it look more colorful. And in the last part, we're going to expose properly changing whether we wanted to make it brighter, darker or parts of the image brighter or darker. So here I'm in light room and again I'm going to try to teach this in a way that whatever program you're using, you'll understand whether you're using light room Photoshopped. I photo on your iPhone on your android. There are usually features to crop. There's usually features to change the exposure and change the saturation, and that's pretty much all I'm going to be doing later on, I'm going to talk about a special few features that light room has that your editor might have that are cool to play around with. But for now, let's start with Crop. This is the photo of the salad that will took in the very beginning and weaken. Scroll through some of these and see, Let me find one that is actually another one that I would doom or cropping on because, well, did a really good job composing this image. Actually, so say, Take this one and I can open up my crop feature and this opens up my crop module where I can basically zoom in, zoom out, rotates slightly, Say we did want to just zoom in a little bit more on this salad, make sure that it's in the center of our frame because before when we were resumed out all the way, it was actually a little bit over to the left of our frame. So we're just going to zoom in to make sure that this is directly in the center. Maybe put it down at the bottom a little bit so that the sound that's actually in focus is in the middle. You don't necessarily always want what you shot to be in the direct center. But for this photo ideo. So I'm going to crop it that way just by using crop tool assuming and a little bit and pressing Return on May keyword. Okay, so I'm happy with my crop. The next thing I'm going to do is skip down to color or saturation. So have this saturation bar right here and again. Whatever you're using, you might have a little bar Isam numbers that you can increase your decrease, and if I increase is all the way, you'll see what happens. Wow, that is way too saturated. But it gives you the point that I'm trying to make that this bar helps you de saturate or increase the saturation. You can also plug in numbers specifically if you have a number in mind. So I would just look at your photo and see, doesn't need a little bit more color. Will's camera, the settings, the raw settings that he's using. Typically, it will need a little bit of a boost in saturation on its Fuji camera. If you're using an iPhone or a smartphone, it usually adds a bit of contrast and good saturation that you might need to not need to increase. You don't want it to look unnatural, but you do want the colors to come across through your photos. And just this compared to if I bring up the comparison, the right compared to the left, it looks a little bit more bright, inviting, colorful and tasty, so boosting that saturation can help. The last thing I'm going to do is play with the exposure, and this is where the beauty of shooting and raw file mode helps. Because these shadows and the brights of your image can really be manipulated. On most photo editors, there's going to be an exposure bar where you can just increase or decrease the exposure of the overall picture. So what this is doing, it's brightening up every single part of my photo or darkening it. And this is good because sometimes if you are running a blogger putting photos in a magazine. Ah, lot of food photos are very, very bright now. Will loves the more contrast it a little bit darker photos, but I actually tend to like some more brighter photos, and it's really your style. It depends on what you want to do. So with this bar, as I mentioned, you can increase or decrease this overall act exposure of the whole image down below. We can actually change the exposure of different parts of our images. So here we have our highlight shadows, whites and blacks, and you might have something like this on your photo editor as well. For example, if I take my blacks and I increased the blacks, you can see that is really just affecting the darker parts of the this image. So these shadows under the plates under the leaves of the lettuce, this dark of the pepper back there. So if I increase or decrease that, you can really see what's happening over here on the left, this vinegar that's really darkening. And if you do want to add contrast to your photo, you can do it that way by decreasing them blacks and then increasing the whites or the highlights. Contrast is basically how dark your darks are and how bright your brights are, and usually having a more contrast, E image will make your food look a little bit better, a little bit more appetizing. and again. That's what will was doing in person live when he was using the black and negative Phil Foam board versus the white bounce card. That's what he was doing live in person. But you can also do that kind of thing in post. In terms of just adding some contrast, I can also play with the shadows, which are not as dark as the blocks. That's kind of the mid range dark since from the middle graze to not quite black. And then the highlights, which are brights but not necessarily white. So I can. If I boost this, it's controlling some of the whites and this this salt in the plate and so boosting that might a little bit might make it look a little bit better, too. So if I look again at the comparison, I couldn't do some different comparison views. You can see here on the right. Very bright, colorful, nice, appealing On the left, it's a little bit dolar, but again it starts from the very first image that you shot with. So let me just reset this. I'm just gonna undo original photo, then to our final photo. Hopefully you can see the difference. And this one, hopefully you think is a lot better. So let's move on to some mawr professional advanced techniques that you can consider doing for your images. I think I'm going to go over to my key lime tart. So let's take one of these key lime tarts. This has some greens in it, but the greens aren't that vibrant. Now I want to make the colors more vibrant, and I could just take the saturation and boost the saturation a lot. But what happens is that the saturation of the orange and the yellows in this tart itself get boosted. The saturation of the Browns and everything else gets saturated as well. What if I just want to boost the greens Well, in light room, what you can do is go down to these H S, L color and black and white module down here. I can actually take this color picker right here, or by going down to the green slider down here. But I'm gonna use the color picker and I take the color picker. I go over to my image. I select the color that I want to effect, and I click and drag up or down. Now, if I drag all the way down, you can see what happens. It takes away the color of just the greens and the yellows that I'm picking right now. But if I boost it, it really increases that green without increasing the yellows and oranges of this tart. Now, if I select this tar and I want to boost that color, I can do that. Maybe I'll just take a little bit of the yellow right in the middle of the tar and boost that. And so that's the way that you can boost the colors of a specific object. If I go over to my soup, for example, let's go back to our soup photo and I do it here. So I take my saturation and I go to my read. I can really boost or decrease the saturation of my red without affecting the greens. Or maybe I want the greens to pop out a little more. So decrease the Reds make those greens pop out, made the greens. I want to de saturate a little bit and so that the Reds pop a little bit more so you can pick a specific color that you want to increase or decrease the saturation of. Now, with all of this, you don't want to go crazy because you don't want it to be unnatural. You want your colors toe look appealing and appetizing. And if it looks like it's some sort of color added to it and a national unnatural, it's not gonna look good. One other thing. I wanted to show you the power of shooting raw images. One of the photos that was a little bit dark was this photo of the coffee beans and the coffee. Hear what I would do is go up to my blacks and shadows and boost those so you could see if I boost my blacks and my shadows. Look how much detail comes from the darkness within here. You can see this steam actually coming up from the coffee. Let me zoom in here, and then I will decrease the shadows. If I boost the shadows, you can see the steam in there, actually, which is a cool thing to do, and you would only be able to get that detail from the darkness by shooting raw and again. That's what the differences between a smartphone photo and a photo to shot in raw mode using a professional or pro Sumer DSLR or Mirrlees camera. Okay, so that's pretty much it. That's what I wanted to cover with editing your photos. Remember, you want to crop to make sure that your composition is perfect. You want to color and make sure that the saturation looks good and make sure food look appetizing. And then you want to expose and change the exposure of your photos so that it's as bright or dark or contrast ID as you want. Let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, thanks again for taking this course and we'll see you in the future. 9. Practice: Morning Coffee: Okay, so film it's a nice cup of coffee and let's take a look at it. And I think here we want to try and tell the story of coffee or kind of work coffee comes from, or the fact that it's a liquid out of coffee beans. Eso maybe. Let's grab some coffee beans, some napkins so we can do right. So I put some coffee beans in this little bowl we put this year, and then we've got the roasted bag these came from. Maybe you feel a little bit on the would see how that works. I might look cool. We just spread some out a little bit. I mean, it's all about really texture and kind of finding some detail. Um, in it, they kind of get lost in the wood a little bit, so I don't know how it looks. And then, um, we will put the bowl near it, so I kind of like that. Yeah, that looks a little bit better. Share that space a little bit there, coffee, and then let's leave the bag out here. Maybe we can put this out of focus background. I really want to advertise for these guys, but here we go. My shot will be there. Take a look. Maybe I'll send it a little bit. I still see the bag, but let's just see if it'll be out of focus. That looks good. Maybe let's add like a napkin. Harry, one of our green napkins kind of matches the color of the bag. Actually, how fortuitous. Kind of like a morning coffee coffee thing again, It all really depends on, like your style on how you want to present your your food and your drinks looks nice. So it's fun. So, yeah, I'm happy with that again. All stuff that we found here very easy, very quick looks professional. Let's take our shots. So I'm gonna go ahead. We've lost a bit of light because it's later in the day. The bounce isn't hitting that building outside quite as much so majestic my settings a little bit. We'll do our 45 degree. That looks nice. I think it's a little it's a little harder contrast. You guys cause the coffee bean there so dark. So because it's so dark, I'm gonna start with the white bounce. We're getting some more white bounce to fill in those shadows. And because the coffee beans are kind of dark, it's kind of frightening those up. And it's also adding a little reflection on the coffee itself. Great. So you can tell that the white bounce filled in quite a bit here, all switched out. Put the negative, Phil, so you can kind of see the difference with the same settings. Okay, so here's with our negative Phil or black card. I'm gonna go and take a shot. Same camera settings, same composition ish. Let's take a look so you can see the white white plus thing is adding and quite a bit of light. And it's really getting rid of the shadows and you can see the beans. And it's a nice bright cup of coffee. The white you kind of lose yourself in cause it's so bright. The negative Phil looks kind of nice early morning coffee, although we do lose detail in some of the blacks and the in the beans where you can kind of fix that in editing, and Phil will show you a little bit of that later. But the real cool idea is that you have options you can change your style. Figure out what best works for you. So let's maybe simplify the setting a little bit and let's see what a different style might look like. Let's simplify it. Take some stuff out. Let's take out the plate. Let's take out the bag. Let's maybe even just turn the cup a little bit, Maybe stylized as being just a little bit more. I like that. But I really don't like the knack it very much. It's kind of taken away from the simplicity of it. Let's bring this closer so we can see background. Let's like, Come on the beans, It's okay, It's a different. It's a different sort of thing. Maybe let's try rotating this and let's put the beans on this side where the light's hitting, filling in between. Maybe that will add a little bit more, really just about playing with what you've got, seeing what you like the most. Now that we've got our lighting set up here and that's nice, I pull this little forward so we can check the background. Awesome. And let's see what that looks like with our white card real quick. Now we got the white card adding Phil getting rid of the shadows a little brighter, a little more Starbucks. He a little brighter. And again you can tell the difference between the Phil and the neg and the contrast versus a bright image. Let me just go around and, ah, do our other kind of angles and shots and show you some details and then we'll move on to the next explains a lot. So these close up shots I'm doing the detail shots. I'm using the black negative, Phil. So you kind of see more shadows and more detail in the cup and the beans. Also, you can see the wood is still maintaining its texture. Um, I'm gonna do some vertical detail shots of the beans. 10. Practice: Key Lime Tart: So we got a key lime tart here. You can see it's just a plate and it's got key lime and fill Cut this fabulous lime right here that we're gonna put We took off our cutting board and using this nice wood table, I think the key here is to take a look at this and maybe try and match color come up with a different background, Um, with stuff that we've got here, you know, we've got some brown kind of burlap e placemats, and we have that green napkin that we had before. So let's start with that and see what that looks like. Instead of doing the whole thing, we might just try and kind of little bit an angle just to still see some of that would in there. And then we'll go green, right, Do the same thing. So now we got some. Get some colors going on. Get the brown here. Brown hair green. Um and then we'll go. We'll get our coffee from before. Put it in a new go I ass. See if that stays there. That's just again toe accent. Grab some brown brown. Um, we got some limes here. I know. Match those. We gotta cut line here. Some lime slices. Add to this again. This is very simple stuff, but still looks great having that green color trying to stick around this color theme on this one. And then again with the green napkin Say we fit that guy in there. I like having forks and utensils medals a little hard because, you know, you're worried about reflection and stuff very green. Um, this is a little yellow. I wonder what else we can add. Color wise. Be good to get some color. Got ourselves, lemon. A little bit of an accent here. Work that in there somehow. All right, so let's go ahead. Let's just try and shoot it with a blank frame with just our white diffused light and we'll see how it goes. So we'll do our 45 degrees shot here first, and I'm just focusing on our main dish. Cool. Our main dish looks pretty good. Let's just change a couple things That looks pretty good. Check it out. I am a little unhappy that we're so close to the edge of the table there, so I would say I would move everything forward very carefully, just a little bit. So we get that edge of the table away, maybe raise our angle up just a little bit. There we go. Perfect. I'd be pretty happy to share this shot on, you know, on Instagram Page or anything like that. And again, this is just plain white diffused light coming in with our basic settings that we talked about before. Let's just to see what it looks like. Let's add our black negative, Phil, and see how that looks. All right, So I didn't come as low The normally Dio maybe we should so is a little bit more at an angle. Again, I'm coming a little bit lower. Just toe fill out the shadows and the ambience. Similar angle here. Cool. So again you can see that the main differences and I move the fork a little. But the main difference is just adding those contrast you shadows makes it look a little bit more contrast. He kind of fills in the black, which makes the front part pop out a little bit more. In that photo, I would actually see if I could get this a little bit closer cause it's gonna look really nice in those details. Shots CNC I'm really cutting the light off here. Have to get in here. Get in here really tight. Cool. So yeah, see, my ankle changed a little bit. You can see here, but I really like the contrast in the dark. And just so you guys can see we'll put in the white bounce. You see a major difference. That's definitely a bright dessert. Major difference, in contrast. And its a lot brighter again. This is per saying this to what style you want to shoot, what photos you want to represent or how you want to represent your style of shooting. But again, bright positive versus negative contrast you, Phil. 11. Practice: Tomato Soup: So we're here with our tomato soup. We're going to kind of dress it up a little bit. We decided to dress it up while it's here, Um, so that we'd have to be shuffling around. So let's let's ah, first decided where we want to play stuff and we're going to still use stuff that we found around the house. So let's figure this out. So tomato soup, obviously some tomatoes think would look good next. It readings are same cutting board because that texture looks great. We got our sultan pepper shakers that we use before point movies back a little bit just to add some depth. We got our bread. I'm I just put that here. Um, just kind of kind of trying to style eyes it, um you know, one thing I don't have is a spoon, but can run to the kitchen and get that really quick. So it means the yellow napkin Now think that contrast with the red nicely. Put a spoon. They're pretty similar. Last set up, but a little different on. And then now, just because it looks nice, just gonna put some a little dollop of sour cream there. It's probably gonna sink and then fill grows his basil outside and just try to dress it up just a little bit. I'm gonna put those in there trying to put the green side up. It looks a lot prettier. The white will look a little bit better with the contrast ing dark soup. But let's do both. And let's see how that goes again. We saw over diffused light coming for our window. We're putting our white balance card up close as we can, using our little D I Y tape using Gaff tape right now, but you can use Scotch tape or masking tape. It's fine. I think it's a little bright, so we'll come down on our shutter. Here's our 45 degrees shot. It's pretty nice again. Basic stuff accents around. So far, they get to another, better sense of style is in the background and shooting the actual subject. So after we do that 45 degree shot, we go ahead and do the hero shot. We do the detail shot and we do the over the head shot so you can see that it's a whole nother style. Same stuff, same areas, same lighting set up, and it's just a little bit different 12. Practice: Cereal: All right. So we're gonna do one of the most classic breakfast is right, cereal. So I've got, like, you know, that typical placemat gonna go back to our table, set this down. Gonna go get my bowl of cereal. So here we go. We use a bigger, thicker bowl. Um, we didn't actually put any milk in it yet. We actually have the milk in the glass. Kind of set the stage a little bit. We put a lot of cereal in there. We also bulked up the fruits just in the top. Think the milk. It's good. The milk son in there because they float around. All right, so let's add, um you know, if you can tell, I'm really digging the napkins. It's good to go get some nice, stylized napkins for what you're doing. Spoon balm still in color. Okay. Breakfast banana again. I'm gonna put that closer to the background. Just add some color in the background and bring it like I might actually moving closer together, pull us forward a little bit. I don't see the inside that strawberry kind of looking at how the light shines against the strawberry and there's gonna be some black or contrast right here. All right. Here we go on, take a shot without our bounce stuff to see what it looks like you were at. Okay, so are 45. Degree. I'm gonna pull this stuff a little bit closer so that we're away from the edge of the table . I don't have to worry about the background as much. Cool. All right. That looks pretty good. Um, actually, it looks really good. You still kind of see some of the contrast is not as contrast use. I think I'd like again. I'm kind of like the stylistic with the contrast in the darker on one side. Maybe a bright breakfast with the white bounce might be better. Maybe one thing we might try to is just adding some serious frankly. Oh, too much. I need to be careful. So you clean it up. Style I some around transmitted, messy, but still appetizing. Straight again. We go. It looks a little bit more fun. Got some cheerios on the side. So let's try and add in our black negative fill and go through the lighting. Okay. I've got our negative Phil kind of closer in there and then. So the cool thing about this shot having that negative, Phil, you can really see that it brings in some shape on the spoon, which is really cool. The reflection is actually just the black part. If you had a bigger, blacker foam core that will make that shape of the spoon look better. Also, it makes the spots on the strawberries and this side a little bit brighter, which I think make it pop more. Um, let's try it and see what it looks like with the white bounce because that might be early morning bright breakfast, some kind of positioning the spoon so that the white is the reflective part as opposed to the black. And that's kind of a trick and reflective things. Car commercials do that quite a bit, actually. Using big white bounce surfaces and black bouncers is too shape metallic objects. Let's take a picture here. Oh yeah, so this is significantly brighter, and you can tell between the three photos between the regular bounce with just a soft and the ambient, and then the negative Phil versus the bright spot. The bright looks actually pretty good. It looks little more breakfast e I think it actually might like that a little bit bored. Metter. I also think using the negative or the positive white bounce looks better on the metallic spoon because it's so shapely that helps a lot make it bounce a little bit more. So let's do our other shots and see what else we can do. 13. Practice: Beer: So sometimes time is of the essence with depending on what kind of food you're shooting. We have a beer here, and we're going to pour it. And I want to make sure the foam is perfect at the top. I just know from experience shooting glassware. I'm gonna want my black negative, Phil. And I'm also gonna pull this curtain down so that I get harsher, harsher light. It's not gonna be really harsh light, but it's gonna be a lot stronger, a little bit stronger then we've been doing before. So now I know that could take a look at this. And I can see the reflection of the light broadened by the black contrast on the right side , which I think will look great. Make sure that opening run away from your camera. Did you see I shook the beer at the end there. And to get that phone to get the top? I'm gonna go quick here so that I still get this this phone here. When I move some of these things, I just want a plane. Beer on would top. All right. That looks pretty good. Actually. Would probably use a darker wood if I had it. Well, that's pretty good. What? We have it here. Let's Ah, since we have a little we have another beer. I'm gonna go and add in a darker wood we've been using before. Justo, give it a little bit more information. I also have this beer here. Gonna added an orange again. Just trying to tell the story tryingto capture the life and attitude of what we're doing here. A little bit of foam, not a ton. Still looks nice. Take this. Get our angle here. Going, man, that looks good. Cool. So you probably get better at pouring appear. But the object is time. And then also trying to know exactly what you want to do. Light wise. Now just going for some detail shots, maybe drink this a little bit and keep going. 14. Full High Speed Photography Workshop compressed: In this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through my entire process of how to get photos like this, this high-speed product, classy style photography. So this is actually a workshop I did for our group during a live session. And I wanted to record it and make sure that I could share it with you here in the class because I thought it was a very cool style and applicable to anyone watching this class as well. So take a look, continue watching. It's a longer workshop. I covered the whole thing from start to finish. And I hope you enjoy. Bye. Alright, so today I'm going to be playing around with high-speed photography. And you probably saw this in plus that these are some inspirational images that I saw. And I was like, how can I get photos like this? And so I've been playing around and using a tool that you don't necessarily need to capture this, but it has made it a lot easier. And it was inspired by this remote trigger. It's called my ops. It's a Kickstarter trigger. Kickstarter project. They actually sent it to me. And whenever companies send me these items, I'm like, Let's see really how good this thing is. And I was trying to think of what could be done with this because there's some really cool things you can do with this trigger. And if you go to the My Apps website, you can see the different things that they have made this trigger for it. You can capture lightning easier, easier. You can do long exposures and time lapses and this high-speed photography. And I'm going to show you why I'm using this and why. This is kinda cool for what we're doing. Today. You probably saw if you follow me on Instagram, that I've been actually able to capture some photos like this just in preparation to make sure I know a little bit about what I'm doing. But today I'm hoping to improve upon some of these photos with some ideas to high very, I see you chat. Welcome, welcome, welcome, thanks for being here. So the first thing I figured I would do is kinda walk through my setup. We're going to take some photos and then I'm going to bring it into editing so that we can really see where the magic happens, which a lot of it comes in the post-production room. With my camera. I can show you my my camera right here. I'm using the C4 crop sensor camera with the 80 millimeter lens. I'm using the 80 millimeter lens because I wanted to be a little bit far from the splashes that might occur from me dropping ice cubes are fruit into the cup that I'm going to be dropping it into. The 80 millimeter is just a nice sharp Chris blends and the app and that's pretty much it. One thing to note about my settings, let me show you my camera. So here you can see the back of the settings and you'll be able to see this when I'm actually taking photos. But notice that I have a one-two thousandth of a second shutter speed. I'm going to be sticking around an F4. And then I'm going to use my lights and my ISO to be able to expose properly. So one thing I did was I'm gonna be shooting in RAW mode. I also changed my Drive settings. So let's see where do I get to drive settings? This is gonna be different on different cameras and not all cameras are going to have this option. But I changed my burst speed, which I'm going to be shooting at burst speed to get as many photos as possible in that short amount of time to 20 frames per second on my camera, it has changed to the electronic shutter. So most mirrorless cameras have a mechanical and a, an electronic shutter. The mechanical shutter is literally like a shutter that like mechanically opens and closes and allows light to come in or allows your sensor to have light hit it, whereas the tronic shutter it does it digitally. But those pros and cons, we'll talk about this more in another session if we want. But the electronic shutter allows you to shoot at a higher, higher frame rate. You could see, I could even go up. You can't really see on the screen here, but this setting right here is 30 frames per second, but there is a crop in. But I'm going to just change out the 20 frames per seconds. So the point is that I'm trying to make is one setting I'm changing is I'm trying to shoot as fast as possible with this camera. I'm using a burst mode, but I'm also shooting at. A fast shutter speed because I want to freeze that light in there as much as possible. Hey, Gianluca, nice to have you here today. That's what my camera any questions about camera gear, let me know in the comments and I'll try to answer behind me. Let's talk about my actual setup in my studio and I can actually go back here. So what I'm gonna be doing is I'm shooting with two continuous lights. You could do this with a flash, but I am used to continuous lights. I have two continuous lights. Something I realized with the photos that I showed you as inspiration. You have a lot of backlight coming through the glass, coming through the liquid. So here I'm going to have this light right here, be that light coming in through the back. And I just have to make sure that my light is out of the frame. Then I added the front light because when I was initially testing out, just having the backlight on, like the fruit and stuff that was falling in front, you didn't have any details because there wasn't enough light on it. Basically. I have another house light on right now that I'm going to turn off when I'm shooting the photos because I want the light to be very focused. And like I said, this could potentially be done with a flash, but it's a lot easier with the continuous lighting because when you're shooting at a high burst mode, the flash is, most flashes are only able to go so quick. And you wouldn't be able to flash 20 frames are 20 times per second, That's just not possible. So having the continuous lighting is something that's gonna be super-helpful. Another thing that I am doing, That's a pretty cool trick that if you've taken our product photography course, here, I have my setup here and it's super simple. I have, it's hard to see, but this is like a black card stock is just like a black piece of paper. And then on top of it, I've put a piece of glass and this is just from a photo frame that I wasn't using. And so that's going to create a little bit of a reflection. So actually, let me actually get my camera on my on my tripod. And you'll be able to see this set-up a little bit better. And calling an asset, Great question, what power are these lights on, full power? Right now they're pretty much on full power and I don't have any sort of grid in front of them. I have a filter on this one actually which kinda spreads out the light with the LED panels. Sometimes when it's shining on, I noticed on the glass you can see it's kinda like speckled light almost. And so I put this little filter which came with the light, which does the same thing as any sort of softbox or filter. And it just spreads out the light a little bit. But this is a, I believe like a 500 watt equivalent light. And the small one might be like 200, so they're not that powerful. Alright, great question. So I have my camera. Let's see, let's change this so you can see what I'm doing. So I practiced this setup, so hopefully this goes smoothly. I'm going to put this on my tripod right here, a little photo tripod. And I'm going to shoot with portrait mode. So this tripod has a ball head that I can rotate like this. Let's just get that drink lined up. My frame. Actually, I'm going to use it this can, so it's a little bit easier to see. I am going to lock down focus and not have it on autofocus after it's set. One reason for that is because depending on the mode that you're going to be shooting in, it might try to focus before, before it actually snaps the photo. And that's going to take a little bit of time. And so I want to make sure there's as the least amount of in camera settings changing before the shutter actually takes the photo as possible. It's still pretty dark. So what options do we have? I can try to move this light a little bit closer. It's already gone full power. I could lower my shutter speed a little bit if I wanted to. That would bring a little bit more light. You can see it's pretty dang dark. Or I could boost my ISO just a little bit. You can tell that that glass is a little bit. It's not clean. Used it yet last week. But in terms of lighting, just like a basic backlight. And a front light, it looks pretty good. It's going to change when we have our liquid in glass. So let me swap this out actually. Because the size might be a little bit different. I want to have enough space, like headroom above this glass to catch the splatter. I might actually move this whole setup just back a little bit. Now behind, I'm just using this pop-up black photo backdrop and just folds up into like a little circle. And on one side it's white and one side is black. Once I locked focus on our glass, I'm just going to change it to manual focus. So it's not changing anymore. I see that light coming in at the top right corner. So I'm gonna move that light now. Now the lighting is going to change a little bit. With when I turn off the house light that's up there. Alright, that's looking pretty good. Now, what's the problem? We see? We see quite a bit of that reflection is not that clean. So in an ideal world, I would probably spend five-minutes cleaning that glass. I'm not gonna do it today because I don't have time. But I'd probably spend a bit more time cleaning that glass and making sure it's sparkling clean in that reflection will be a lot better. Alright, now let's talk about this piece of tech and why this is going to help me. If I had another photographer in here, the way this would work is one photographer would be on the camera ready to press the shutter button. I would be on top of the cup, ready to drop ice. And we would have a count down and I would drop the eyes. And my assistant would just be snapping away high shutter speed. I can't be doing these two things at once. And that's where this little tool helps. So this is called the myapp smart trigger. And you can set it to do different things. One of the things is you basically can have a have a trigger that or have something that triggers the shutter. And that something could be movement, it could be sound. There's different, more advanced options, but basically with sound, what it does is I can make a sound and then it will trigger the shutter. So if I'm on the other side of the room, if I clap, if I say Say cheese or whatever, this will hear it and trigger my camera, which is pretty cool. So I can do all this by myself now. And it has a smartphone app. I'm going to record my screen. And when I put this all together for the replay, you'll be able to see what this app actually looks like. But you can see on here that you can also control everything on this device itself. This device plugs in to my cameras remote input. And most DSLR mirrorless cameras will have a remote input. The simplest is just like a wired string that goes to a shutter button that allows you to, when you're taking portraits or something else standing, doing long exposures, it allows you to not be touching your camera and press the shutter release button that's wired on here. So again, this is helpful if I'm by myself doing this. I don't want you to think that you can only do this kind of photography if you have this app and this tool, you just need to probably need a friend to drop ice or a kid to drop ice or help you out. I'm going to set it to sound. So It's hard to see here, but you can see that it has a setting, there's a line and it's actually monitoring the sound right now. You can see that bumping up and down and all of those orange lines are when it would actually trigger the shutter. And I could change the sensitivity. So I'm in a pretty controlled environment, so I can be really quiet, see if I stop talking. There's no sound really. And so I could change the sensitivity down. But if I was outside there was a lot of noise. I could put this up so that the traffic noise behind me, the wind, people talking in the background. That's not going to trigger the shutter, but maybe a big loud bang or a big clap would. Okay. So this is sensing this right now. So what I'm gonna do is I have to plug in my this to the camera. Then I'm going to set this right next to me so that it can because it's monitoring the sound on my phone, not from this device. You can set it to monitor from the device. But using the app that's, it's all connected. I'm going to monitor from my phone. Alright. Let me know if this is all making sense. If you're confused or anything like that. So I have a little smartphone holder right here that's just on a tripod. So that's gonna be sitting right here. When I'm actually taking the photos, I'm going to be behind right here. Then this trigger is plugging in to my camera. So it has a has a cord that plugs from the device into my camera. Make sure I have it on the right one. They make attachments where you can have a little threaded screw and this could just slide onto the top of your hot shoe mount. And actually it kinda just slides in there like that. I didn't realize it did that, but I had it clipped onto my tripod before. The first thing I wanna do is make sure that the whole setup is working before I start dropping ice into my cup because I only have a few times of doing that before everything gets too wet and it's not going to work well. Alright, right now what I'm gonna do because we're getting pretty close to actually taking photos. I am just turning off that house light. So now I'm gonna go back on my phone. And I'm actually going to turn on the trigger to actually take photos. And you should see on the screen, you should see the camera flash when that does that. So I'm gonna be quiet then I'm going to turn this on. Alright? So when I'm talking, I can see that flashing. So I'm going to turn this off because I don't want to weighs too much too much noise, too many photos that I've turned that off for now, but it's definitely working. Alright, so now how are we going to set our scene? So I'm just gonna do a basic Let me just get one paper towel. Tried to clean this as best as possible. You gotta be very careful because the first time I was doing this, I ended up getting like, there's like one piece of hair that was like on the cup or on the glass. And you can photoshop that out, but it's just a lot easier to have a better set up ahead of time. You know what I need? I need ice. So I will be back in thirty-seconds with some ice. Go get a drink of water. Yourself. Take a sip and if you have questions, leave them in the chat, I'll be right back. You can see from the, it's a pretty small workspace here. But all of this stuff, just make sure it's not in your frame time. So the first thing I'm going to do is actually fill up my glass with water. And I'm actually going to do this off off of this because I don't want it to spill. I'm using a sparkling water. I just think like the bubbles create another element. That's nice. Okay. Alright, that's pretty good. Alright, looking pretty good. That's almost like a full can. Well, there's a lot of light. When I'm looking at this setup, there's a lot of light spilling onto my backdrop. But because my shutter speed is high enough and I guess there's light coming from the background or from this way. I'm not seeing the background. I want that to be as pure black as possible. And you could fix that in post a bit. Now, another very important thing that you want to do, because when we're editing these photos, I'm going to be combining different photos, different splashes. Once this gets wet, it's not going to be very usable. So what I'm actually going to do is take a photo now before we actually do any splashes so that I have that as like the background palette if I want this reflection. Now the key to this is that after I take this photo, I don't want to move my cup or the table or anything else. So let me just make sure my frame is exactly what I want. My focus, my focus is a little off, so. Always double-check. Came just tilting up just a little bit higher. Now it looks pretty good. My light is a little low. Alright. Are you guys enjoying this? So far? I'm enjoying it. We're making good time to. Alright, so let's make some splash photography. So this is framed well, right now, let me turn this on so I can take a couple still shots of just the glass where it is. So that's going to take a photo or if I go sorry, I know that's kind of awkward, but that's the sound. I'm going to make. One other thing, I guess decision. And I was playing around with different setups, is I had some width like a piece of lime on here. I maybe had some background elements just to make it look a little bit more professional. So I would actually do this first. Before. I. Then take another like clean plate shot. Plate, meaning it's like the, the, the still shots that I'm going to edit together so that now it looks okay. There's not that much light on those. There we go. Let's move this stuff. You guys think It's not look good, is that lime? Think I'm going to rotate that line just a little bit. I think that looks pretty dang good. Yeah. What do you think? Alright. Now, just because I'm paranoid, I'm just going to check, check the focus one more time. I'm just setting it to autofocus, focusing with a half pressing the shutter and then changing the manual focus. Want to see what it's like without this. It's cool just having the light coming from behind. But I just don't see our fruit enough. We're going to work with this. Okay? Alright, so I'm going to reset, retake that one photo of the before photo before I do any splashes. Alright. Now I have noticed that even though I have my camera set to burst mode, the electronic shutter, It's supposed to take 20 frames per second. There is some discrepancy in using this app and how many frames that takes. So what I've noticed is I just kinda have to do it a few times and hope for the best. Okay. So I'm going to try to get my timing down because there is somewhat of a lag between its sensing it here on my my phone and then it connecting with the device on my camera. So we're just gonna go for it. Should we go for it? Yeah. I need some likes and thumbs up. I'm just going to see okay. I'm just gonna go for it. Missed not the first time that's happened. Alright. Again, clean piece of ice. I'm going to put a little bit more liquid in there on a big splash and some bubbles. I'm taking some photos now because I might use some of those photos with the bubbles pouring in. Alright, let's go. Oh man, that's gotta work on my jump shot. Alright. I'm just going to keep going because I don't know if I got that one. Trial and error. Now wasn't a good splash. Let's take these two out. Now. I don't care that the bottom is wet now because I'm going to use the first plate to combine in composite it together. So that's a good splash. I'm not sure if it got it. I just playing around. Now I'm gonna do a couple where I'm dropping some limes and lemons in. That was a big splash. Will not be drinking this again. So see I move that the cup just a little bit. So I'm not sure if the composite is gonna be as easy for these photos, but let's try it again. Alright. What do you guys think of that? Let me check my comments. Okay. Yes, it is messy. Okay. One last thing I'm gonna do before I bring my photos into the computer and you'll be able to see those. Is I noticed when I was dropping the fruit and before it just wasn't as sharp as I wanted it to. And I don't know if it was the shutter speed. The ISO wasn't that. It was kinda high. So what I'm gonna do is take some photos with just the fruit and maybe composite it going on or on top of the photo. So what I'm using is just this fondue skewer. You could use anything, but I'm going to try to attach my lime that was falling through the sky to this. And I'm actually I'm not going to I'm not going to change the lighting or anything. I don't want the settings really to be changed. I'm just going to have this still falling through the sky like this. And take a photo of it over here so that I can composite with the same lighting, same settings, same everything. I got to turn this back on. Well, I want the lemon. Which side looks better? There's like professionals, food stylists that do this for a living. Alright, let's see if any magic has been made. Oh, my hands are sticky now. Alright, I can't wait to clean up this setup. It's been in my garage for like a week. Alright, so I'm going to turn this off. I'm not going to move anything because I might have to come back here and take some more photos. If those if it didn't catch the splash, It's totally trial and error. And a lot of trial and a lot of her. Okay. Okay. We're coming up on the first couple of splashes. Oh, this one's not bad, I can tell. Okay, cool. I'll bring these up full screen. Don't worry, don't worry. Oh, nice. Okay. We're going to uncheck all. Yeah. This is coming out good, right? Cool. Okay, I got some stuff. Give me some claps for that. Nice. Alright. Let's see. I'm just going to pick a couple. I could probably spend I would probably spend like 20 minutes just looking at these individually. But I'm just gonna pick a few good ones. So one good one from before we dropped anything. I already see these ones. These are the goods splashes, so we've got this one, this one, this one. I think this one works pretty good. I'm going to import all three of these actually. This one is pretty good. It actually got it falling, but see how this is just not sharp. It's a little bit out-of-focus the motion. I think that's why actually including compositing the other photos together with it, it's going to work better. That was really the best splashes. I don't really see any others splashes that did that Good. So one thing I might I don't know if this was a splash or this was right after I poured the water. I can't tell but it's cool. I have this little fizz in the air, There's bubbles in the glass. So I might use part of this image in my composite. Yeah, that looks like just right after I was pouring pouring the drink in. Okay. So this is a photo like this is the before photo that I'm going to just use. I don't like how the lemon in the back it has that very end, a little nub on the end right there. I probably wouldn't move that next time if I did this again. Here's my Mrs. Mark brick. So I've got those few photos and then let's go to the photos where I'm just holding up the line and the lemon. I'm glad those ones worked. Okay. So here, even having like this one afterwards with the lime at the bottom is kinda cool. Let's see. I mean, anything like this could work and then I can just Photoshop out the fondue stick that's holding it up. Let's just look at this one different angle. So the positioning wasn't right, the focus isn't on it. So that's a problem. Something to pay attention to and maybe have it on autofocus for the shots after the fact. That one's pretty good though. Then let's get with Photoshop. I can take this, I can rotate it around, I can move it around. So really I could put it anywhere. I'm just looking for one that's like sharp enough. The lighting is good. Something like that's pretty good. Okay. So now I'm going to import these photos. I know I'm kinda like running through this part of it, but then we're going to slow down for a minute and take a look at editing all of these. Right? So let's move me up here. Myself. Down those good. We'll see we'll see where I end up. Okay, So here we have my photos. Let's go to the Develop tab. And I'm going to edit all of these manually. I'm not going to play around with any presets or anything like that. But I think all in all we got some pretty good options to play around with. Now if I jump from this photo to the first, I can tell that the glass has moved just slightly, but that's okay for these last ones, I'm really focused on just using the lime. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the one that I think is the best splash. I think this one's pretty dang good. I'm going to star this one. I'm going to put this at five-stars. Whoops, actually, that's not where I do that. I'm just going to mark it as five, hitting F9 on the keyboard, actually for this first one. And then this one. Actually I'm not gonna do this one. I'm going to do this one right here with the fizz, then this one, and this one. Okay, so now when I filter to five-star, I just have these four photos that I want to work with. And basically what I'm going to do is just edit one of them and apply those same edits to the rest of the photos. So for this, I'm going to bring up the shadows a little bit now this is a preference. Now something I noticed is when I bring up the shadows, I get more of that, those little splatters, those that fits in the sky, In the sky above the cup. You might like that or maybe you want it like a cleaner look and you want that splash to be clean. That's a preference. The blacks, I'm going to crush the blacks quite a bit. This is definitely like a higher contrast style. I'm going to boost the contrast. I'm actually going to just bring up the overall exposure. Vibrance. I'm going to bring up a bit. And then clarity is where we can make some magic happen to see how if I bring up the clarity, how good that looks. Kinda soft. But here I really want to see the details. And then I'm going to play with the texture even. That's looking pretty, pretty dang good. So here's the before, after, before, after. Not much. I'm gonna go down to my detail. I'm going to apply some noise reduction. Let's see. I was at somewhat of a higher ISO. I don't see too much noise, but I do want to just apply some sharpening. I might just boost up a bit too. Now I could go in and what I've done before is do some individual edits of different parts of this image as well. But for this one, I'm just going to go to HSL. I'm going to bring up my yellows and my greens, which is really where the saturation is that I want to increase. Okay, What do you guys think? We can pretty good before and after. So if I just copy these settings, Command C on a Mac Control C. If I copy this, then I can just go to these other photos and paste those settings are right. So now what I'm going to do, which is something that I just process wise, I would recommend is I'm going to actually make virtual copies of all of these photos because I might want to come back and edit the original. What I'm going to do is I'm going to send these photos over to Photoshop to work on. And so by doing that, if I do anything in Photoshop, it's going to save it to the original photo here on Lightroom. Because I want the original photo. I'm gonna make a copy basically. So I'm right-clicking all of the photos, saying create virtual copies. And then with these ones, I'm going to mark red so that I always do that. I'm going to select them and label them, read. We go Set Color Label Red. Then now I'm going to filter to read. So I'm just seeing these photos down bone below. I don't want to accidentally edit any other ones. And then I'm going to select all of them and right-click and choose edit in Photoshop. This is where we can have more magic. Has everyone doing, everyone enjoying this? Any questions so far? Alright, so now let's make sure you can see my Photoshop screen. Alright, so you can see Photoshop, right? Alright, so we have our four images up here. And basically what I'm going to do is combine these photos. So I'm going to start with our base layer. I'm going to actually copy this photo to the other layer or the other project that I have open. So I'm going to select all command, a copy, command a, select everything in this photo, and then I'm going to copy it Command C, then Control V it over here. So now I have both layers on this photo. Then what I'm going to do is actually don't want this background layer to be the background. I want it to be on top. So I'm going to unlock this over here and drag it up top. Now we have that bottom layer on top. And what I'm going to do is crop in now because I realized that my framing was a little off with the bottom of the frame here with this glass. I'm going to crop in just a little bit. So I'm going to use my crop tool. I like the original ratio, you could change it if you wanted. And I'm just going to crop in right here. And actually I think I'm gonna do a maybe eight by ten so I can get more, more in on the sides. Once I'm done with that crop. Here we go. So now we have our splash layer underneath our top layer. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drop this into this layer mask. And if this is confusing, I suggest you take my Photoshop class because we cover all of this stuff. But basically what this allows me to do is paint off some of this image. So I press B on my keyboard, which is the brush tool over here. I can make it bigger or smaller with the settings up here or the keyboard shortcut Control option. And then drag left or right. That makes it bigger or smaller, up or down makes it hard or soft. And I believe that would be Alt, Control clicking and dragging on a PC. So now I want to erase this. And so to erase, I'm going to change it to the black color here. You typically have black and white set right here. So I want the black on top, which is erasing some of this layer mask, which you see here in the bottom right is what? It's all white. But when I start. Brushing it off, you can see that there's black, which means when those black it means there's nothing there. So now I can paint off all the top of this original photo, but they still have the bottom. So I still have that mason jar on the bottom with the clean reflection. Then I could come in here and choose with an paint back with the white one. And maybe even with a lower opacity. So it's kinda blending on rather than fully painting on. I can paint on some of the bits right here where there's some bubbles going up. Keyboard shortcut X on your keyboard switches between black and white. So you can easily go from black to white. I want to make sure that I see more of this lemon. But if I turn off this back layer, you can kinda see what is included from that original layer, right? Alright. So there we have this image that's looking pretty good with these splashes. Next one I'm going to do is I'm just going to select this lime. What I can do is just take my selection tool right here, Quick Selection Tool, brush over my lifetime it does a pretty good selection. Then I'm going to say Select and Mask. And let's just change some of these settings. I'm trying to get the edge of this lime. Again, this is something that if you don't know how to do this, take the Photoshop class. Because I know I'm just kinda quickly going through how this works, but I'm just making a selection basically. And then I'm changing the settings to try to get a fine tuned selection as much as possible. I could have gone in here, done like a higher-quality photos, zoomed in a little bit closer to the lens with better lighting so that this line pieces even sharper. But this is gonna work. So when I made that selection, it created a new layer of this, this lime. I still have my background layer if I want to turn that on and do anything with it, but I'm just going to copy this layer over to my original project that I'm working on now, which has two layers. And if I paste it, it has this new lime layer that's kinda like falling. Now, you've got to pay attention to how does this interact with these other layers. I feel like there's lime should be like behind the splash, right? So what I might do now is take this bottom layer of the splash itself, copy it, and put it on top. Then erase most of it except for the splash at the top, which will basically sandwich the lyme falling layer within the splashes. I'm going to turn my opacity back up. I want to erase everything on the bottom. I'm actually just going to erase everything on this. And there's a quicker way to do this with making the layer mask all black. But that works now. So nothing is being seen on this top layer because I erased it all. But if I start painting just this little splash right here. You could fine tune it as much as possible. There's other ways to do this. I could use the elect, the selection brush to select just this part of the way, the splash and copy it to another layer. But basically this is doing the trick, right? So that's pretty good. And I don't even know if I need to add that lemon slice. But the cool thing now is I can select my line layer and I can just move it around and it kinda goes behind the splash. I could rotate it. Kinda like how it was. Maybe a little bit more rotate in this way. So I could add that, that lemon layer if I wanted. But now you know, the process for adding that layer, and I think I'm going to leave it like this. So this is looking pretty good, right? Pretty cool. I'm going to clean it up just a little bit. So if I save this layer in Photoshop, it's actually going to save it back to Lightroom. So what I have done to this photo, the DC SCF 4329, it's saving it and when I come back to Lightroom, it's going to apply it there. So let me switch over to the Lightroom so you can see light room. Let's see, once it saves, it's a big project, so it takes a minute to save. Alright, so here you have this now saved here in Lightroom. So I can go ahead and make any other final adjustments to this. So maybe something I would do for this photo. I'm going to actually look at my crop again, just make sure that my cup is more centered. Something like that. And then also level it's a little off. Something I don't like about this reflection. I don't like this hard edge right here of the glass. So I'm actually just going to take an adjustment brush. And I'm just going to decrease the exposure and see if I can just kinda like blur this out, maybe. Oops, I lost my brush. Lower exposure, lower sharpness. That might be something I might take a, add a gradient brush and just do like this whole bottom half right here, this bottom corner. And just decrease the exposure. Blur it. Sharp, decrease sharpness, decrease clarity. I don't want to affect that lime too much. And I could go in and brush this part of the lime out even more. I might just add with this mask selected, add another linear gradient and do the same thing to this corner like that. Then here's where I could go in and use a brush or a radial gradient. Whoops, let's undo that. Let's just make a minor adjustment to this lime sitting here. So I have auto mask on and brushing on just once like this lime as much as possible. And then here maybe boost the exposure, the clarity, contrast just to make it pop just a little bit more. Maybe even change the tint just a little bit more of a green, just to make it a little bit more stylized. And then once I have that locked down in terms of the style, I like, I might just use that same, I have the same thing on. I'm going to add another brush and brush onto our lemon over here. If you have 15. Thank You: thanks for taking a course. I just wanted to take a moment to say Thank you. And if you guys have any questions, feel free to contact filler. I please check out video school online dot com, and you can follow me on instagram at William Carnahan or check out my website at William carnahan dot com. So here's to you guys. Happy food shooting cheers.