Full Frame Texture Shot: Capture Edge To Edge Detail of a Single Subject

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Tabatha. And in this photography class, we're going to be taking a picture of texture. This kind of shot is awesome for a feed or portfolio. It helps kind of break it up by adding this more of an abstract close up feel to your work. You can use these images on your website for just a little touch of flare, maybe a cookbook or a puzzle, or just a beautiful piece of art to hang in your home. There are so many use cases for this kind of shot, and it's a really fun way to add some personality or mix up your workflow. So I hope you will join me for this click music class, and I hope that you feel inspired to share the images that you create. My name is Tabitha. I'm a lifestyle product and food photographer and teacher here on Skill Share. I've been doing what I do for just over eight years, and I'm really excited to share all my tips and tricks that I've picked up along the way with you. So let's get started. 2. Project and Equipment: Thanks so much for joining me. For the class project, you're going to need a camera and something to photograph. For your something to photograph, consider maybe herbs or ingredients, fresh produce, peanut butter, something that you can spread out so that it hits edge to edge of all the edges of your frame near photo. We are going to be photographing it all on the same plane. And so it's important that whatever you choose can be relatively flat so that the whole image can be in focus. I'm going to be shooting with my Nikon D 750 DSLR and a macro 105 millimeter lens. I love this lens. It offers me a lot of flexibility, and it has a really nice minimum focal distance, so I can get really close to my subject, and it will still focus. I don't know if you've had that issue where you try to take a picture of something, and it's like, it won't focus because you're too close, and you have to back up, and then your framings all weird. The macro doesn't do that. It means I can get really close up pictures of my subject, and I can also back up and get more of the shot in the scene as well. You don't need a macro lens for this class, but I would recommend a lens in the focal range 50-120. Anything wider than 50, it's going to be tricky to not have a lot of distortion. It's going to be tricky to get everything in the shot because you're going to be seeing a lot more of the scene. And then obviously on the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have to be so far away from your scene to get it framed well that it'll be tricky that way. So if you have a Zoom lens, I would try setting it to 50 millimeters, maybe 85 millimeters, and playing around. With that and see what you like in that range. For my demo, I'll be using my continuous light with a light dome attached to it. You can do this picture with a window, and I will show you that as well. So if you will join me in my kitchen, we'll grab our cameras and get shooting. 3. Photoshoot: For my shot demo, I'm going to be photographing Star Anise. I've got a bunch just laid in a pile here, and I'm going to take an overhead flat lay style image. I have my light dome setup here with the honeycomb grid attachment. I chose this one because it's the happy middle. Using the diffusing panel was too soft, and using a bare bulb gave me too harsh of shadows. This is perfect. This will help give these edges texture and contrast. Position my light from the side so that it scrapes across the top of my scene. This is called raking light. This is where the light hits the mountains and cast shadows in the valleys. This is what we need to have our high contrast texture shot. So I'm going to jump in. I'll put my settings on the screen so you can see where I am at. Basically, I have layered these so that they're about two layers deep, and I put them on black so that you can't really see that they end. I want to imply that these go on and on and on, and they're very gratuitous. And I'm going to try to make this pile look bigger than it actually is. So I have flipped a few to show the shiny little ani seeds in there. And those are going to catch the light in a really nice way. I want to position enough of these so that you can see the really pretty star texture, and it's not just kind of like muddy blocky ugly bits. So I'm really happy with how this looks. I'm going to try to get these kind of three as the main focus in the center. So I'm going to adjust and I'm really happy with how this looks. I'm going to get even closer because I can. I typically go for tall compositions because a lot of my work ends up being shared on Instagram. And so I want to make sure that I'm composing for that crop. However, once you have a setup like this already done, it benefits you to capture wide shots as well, because you never know when you maybe want to license your work to be used elsewhere, and you'll be glad that you have a copy of it from the other orientation. Awesome. I really love how this turned out. If you were going to try to take this picture with your phone, if you have an iPhone, I recommend tapping the one x twice to get to the 35 millimeter lens. This is the main camera lens. It's not the macro lens. I found that the macro lens, which is also the wide angle lens tends to be lower quality and have more pixel noise and just grain in general. I found that it's harder to get a high quality image with that lens. So I just use the main camera lens and I tap to 1.5. And then for this, I want to get as close as possible without triggering that macro lens. And so I can't get super close. But being able to take a picture of the whole scene and then crop afterwards, I feel like you're going to get a very similar effect using just your phone. If you want to mimic the look of a light dome or a strobe light, basically this situation with a grid, but you only have natural light to work with, I recommend finding a window that direct light comes through and then diffusing that direct light with a piece of tracing paper. This is going to give you a really bright but diffused light. And then from there to make sure that your lights coming from just the side rather than all above, you can take a fill card or a piece of black foam core and block the top half of that light so that only the side light spills over and not the fill light. Here is the two images side by side, one lit with the light dome and the other lit naturally using a window. And I feel like the result is very comparable. To edit this image, I'm going to punch up the contrast and sharpen it really, really well. I'm going to remove any distracting elements from the picture and make sure that I'm keeping the most important part or the most eye catching part on one of these four crosshairs following the rule of thirds. Here is a few quick edits that I would use on these images, cropping 24 by five and being able to share on social media. 4. Final Thoughts: And that's everything. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that this was insightful to be able to take a peek into how I would craft a shot like this, sculpting my light, and editing it to make it look its best. Here's some other example photos of this concept. I hope that you feel inspired to take a texture shot of your own, photographing something that you feel drawn to, whether it's a wood pile or an array of candy. Maybe it's the soft swirl of butter cream on top of a cake. Whatever you decide to photograph, I hope that you keep these tips in mind and get it to look it's best showing off that texture and letting the image be a piece of art on its own. Ever you photograph, I hope that you share it in the project section, so I can see I always love seeing what you create. If you share on Instagram, make sure to tag me, my handle is just tap of the park. If you enjoyed this class and you want to watch more, I have over 36 classes here on Skillshare from photographing product and food to making your own backdrops like this one. Thank you so much for your time, and I will see you in the next one.