iPhone Food Photography: The Ultimate Guide | Benjamin Dizdarevic | Skillshare
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iPhone Food Photography: The Ultimate Guide

teacher avatar Benjamin Dizdarevic, Filmmaker & Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Trailer

      2:22

    • 2.

      Food: A Culinary Art

      1:53

    • 3.

      What You Will Need

      2:09

    • 4.

      Going Over The Agenda

      3:26

    • 5.

      White Balance

      6:24

    • 6.

      Light: A Crash Course

      8:35

    • 7.

      Using Artificial Lights

      4:15

    • 8.

      Using Natural Lights

      6:23

    • 9.

      Composition Technique

      7:47

    • 10.

      Learning Camera Settings

      6:16

    • 11.

      Flattering Angles

      4:21

    • 12.

      The Power of Styling

      7:00

    • 13.

      Cooking at Home

      1:12

    • 14.

      Home Photography

      17:30

    • 15.

      Special Restaurant Visit: Aida's Zone

      2:04

    • 16.

      Restaurant Photography

      13:01

    • 17.

      Editing Strategy

      1:49

    • 18.

      Full Edit, Part I

      18:04

    • 19.

      Full Edit, Part II

      7:32

    • 20.

      Analyzing Before & After Photos

      4:21

    • 21.

      Your Assignment

      1:46

    • 22.

      You Are Ready!

      0:46

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About This Class

Class Overview

Taking stunning iPhone food photos is fully within your power - once you know how. Food photography is more than just “taking a picture with your phone”. It’s lighting, color, composition, photo editing and color theory. With the help of this class, you will take photos that you can taste - in just two days.

What You Will Learn

This course will teach you all the steps involved in taking stunning food photography. Not just the photos you’d take to send to friends but photos that are Instagram-worthy. The things you will learn include:

  • Proper exposure balance
  • Lighting using natural & artificial light
  • Composition techniques for flattering angles
  • Color theory and complementary colors
  • Prep work & styling: How to “set the scene” for your food photos
  • Editing photos using Lightroom Mobile to really bring out the savory taste of food
  • Taking pictures at home as well as in restaurants (controll vs improvised)

Why Take This Class?

Food is an important aspect of our lives. It provides us with fuel for our bodies and is good for mental health. We eat at least 3 times a day and therefore should make the best of the situation and take pride in what we eat.

One way to express that is to take photos of what we eat. You should take this class if you want to take the best possible photos of your food, no matter if it's at home or out in public.

Who Is This Class For?

This course is for the person who sees food as an art and would like to present it as such through photography. And if you’re anything like me, you also want food photography to be easy and accessible without the need of fancy, expensive cameras. So if you want to photograph your food by only using an iPhone - you’ve come to the right place.

Materials & Resources

  • iPhone or Android phone.
  • Lightroom Mobile app (free version works just fine).
  • Access to good natural light (windows) or basic artificial lights.
  • A good mood!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Benjamin Dizdarevic

Filmmaker & Photographer

Teacher

Who Am I?

Hey there, my name is Ben and I'm a Bosnian-Swedish filmmaker and photographer, living and working in Stockholm. My passion has always been in the arts of the camera, whether it be photography or making movies. Besides that, I really really enjoy myself a good cup of coffee while I snuggle up and watch movies with my wife.

My Passions

This passion of mine, in the later years, extended into wanting to teach others how to create art using a camera and how to create a business out of their passion.

I'm glad you found your way over here to my page and I hope I'll be able to provide you with good value as you go on your journey!

Where To Find Me

I always enjoy connecting with like-minded people who are on a similar path with me. If... See full profile

Related Skills

Photography More Photography
Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Trailer: When you get served food at a restaurant, you can tell that a lot of care and effort was put into making that food by the chefs from the preparation to the making to the plating of that food. This is why a lot of people call food a culinary art. And what better way to represent that art than to use a different art form photography to showcase it. And that's exactly what I'm going to teach you how to do. And to make this extra fun, I am challenging myself to teach you how to take really good food photos by only using your phone in under two days. My name is Benjamin, and I'm a filmmaker and photographer from Sweden. Besides directing movies and working commercially for large brands like Samsung and Amazon, I too like to sometimes just take my time and photograph or film something just for my sake. And one of those things is food. Food that I eat at restaurants, that I cook at home with my wife or bread that I bake, and I like to share that with friends and family on social media. And having taken a ton of photos in the past in which you can really savor the taste and capture the flavor of the food that you see in the picture, I would now like to step forward and teach you how to do the same thing. What I will teach you in this course is how you can take top class photos of your food, whether it be at home or in a restaurant. By only using your phone. I'll take you through all of the prep work and theory required to really master this type of photography. This includes things like either using natural light or artificial light to light your food, composition and angle techniques that are used by influencers and in cookbooks so that you can really create some flattering angles in your food photography. And finally, I'm going to teach you my own personal special editing techniques that I use in Lighter mobile. The goal is to create a photo in such a way that the people looking at the photo can really savor the tastes of that food. That's when you really know that you've nailed it. You're essentially going to go from taking photos like this, to this. In other words, it's not just going to be Instagram worthy, it's going to be gallery worthy. So if the idea of any of this piques your interest, it certainly piques my interest, and I would love to have you on board. So if you're ready for this, hit that play button, and let's get started with the first chapter. Okay. 2. Food: A Culinary Art: Food, one of the few essentials and pleasurable experiences that we share with almost every other living being. We need it to fuel our bodies, to energize ourselves, and sometimes we indulge in it for the sake of enjoyment. In addition to that, we humans like to treat our food a certain way, like a culinary art. We not only cook and eat our food, but when we cook it, we tend to present it in an aesthetically pleasing way. Chefs call it plating. You've probably heard the expression we eat with our eyes. The reason we say that is because studies have shown that we as people tend to think that food tastes better simply by the way it's plated and presented to us. It's an illusion that we don't mind falling for, like watching a magic show. We know that people don't actually get sawed in half. We know that magicians are lying to us. Yet we pay for tickets to go and watch a show. It's a lie that we're comfortable with. All the good experiences in life is something that we gladly want to share with other people. We no longer only have food critics. Now we have influencers as well. People who travel the world just taste food, photograph it, rate and review it. This elevated form of indulging in food is what probably separates us most from the animals. Why wouldn't we want to share it? I believe that if we are to share with the world anyway, why not share it in the best way we possibly can with properly refined photographs that do the most justice to the food we spend so much time preparing, cooking, and plating. Photographs that are inspiring. Photographs that you can taste. M 3. What You Will Need: The first thing that we need to cover before anything is to talk about all the things that you're going to need to do this course and to complete this course. First and foremost, you're going to need a camera on your phone. You can use iPhone, you can use Android, you can use anything you like as long as that phone has a camera. I will be using my iPhone together with the inbuilt camera app of mobile. Second of all, you're going to need access to good lighting, and by good lighting, I don't mean you necessarily need a huge studio lamp like the one I got right here. If you do, that's great. But daylight, anything in the house where if you have big windows, you got sun coming through, or without the sun, just diffused natural good daylight will suffice. And then as a bonus, if you do happen to have some interesting lamps, candles, small ambiental lights at home that you would want to experiment with and use throughout this course, you may absolutely do so, and that's just a bonus. But a main key light in the form of either an artificial lamp or daylight will be necessary to do this course, because in the end, lighting is what's going to make or break your image. And the third and final thing that you need for this course is going to be a photo retouching app. You could use the native built in app of your iPhone or Android, but you will be limited in terms of creating a complex style. Maybe you will just be able to do a little bit of tweaks to improve the photo. But if you really want to go all the way and create a proper style, then I would recommend for you to download Lightroom mobile, which I will be using as we go along in this course and as I edit the photos. So if you want to tag along with me and do everything step by step, the way that I do it and the way that I edit things, then I highly recommend that you get Lightroom mobile. That's pretty much it. T hose are the three things that you need to complete this course. Once you have those three things checked off, just hop into the next chapter, where I will take you through the agenda, what we're going to do in day one, day two, and how we're going to finalize the entire course. 4. Going Over The Agenda: All right, I hope you are as excited as I am. I'm going to tell you now what exactly is going to go down. This is going to be a two day long adventure. Now, why am I separating this into two days? Well, because on day one, we're shooting at home. On day two, we're going to that special restaurant visit to photograph in a restaurant setting. Why is this considered to be two different things? Because at home, we have full control over lighting composition, camera settings, angles. We have all the time in the world to really set up a shot and make it happen. Whereas when you go to our restaurant, You don't really have that time. We have to improvise there. The food gets cold really fast, or people start eating and when it's eaten, it's gone. So that's why this is separated into those two days. Theory is very important to go through as a first point. Now, I need you to bear with me and really go through that theory because I photographic was easy, everybody would do it, and everybody would have access to really, really good photos. But we already know that's not the case. There's something special about a photographer's eye versus just a regular restaurant goer who photographs something on their phone for social media. So my goal here is to go through that theory so that you can really master the basics of camera lights, composition, angles, all of that good stuff, so that you can set yourself up for success time and time again when you take your photos. After we finish with that and during the time we talk about theory, my wife will go to the store and she will buy the ingredients for the meal that we're going to cook at home so that we can take a photo. In both of these settings at home and in the restaurant, I'm first going to take a photo naturally the way that anybody would, if they were in a restaurant or they had food in front of them, I'll just take a standard photo. And then I'll start setting it up properly to take a more professional looking photo. The reason for this comes at the very end of this course, and that is because so that we can later on compare what it looks like from the point of view or the eye of a regular person taking a photo and the eye of somebody who's shooting with intention and who knows the settings and who understands lighting. Then we can really compare the differences so that you can see that the things that you learn how much weight they carry. And how powerful it is once you actually know the theory and can implement it into your photography. It's sort of like a progress bar. You're going to be able to see a before and after, and then I'll discuss and analyze why these things work the way they do. And of course, in between all of that, we're also going to be doing some editing to really polish those photos and make them look as good as possible to bring out all the good parts of that food into photography. So as you can tell, this course is going to be very, very practical, but it's also going to mix in a lot of theory, a lot of heavy information. But in the end, all that information is going to be really good for you in the future when you take photos, either of food or of anything else. So I hope this sounds really fun to you because it certainly sounds fun to me. So when you're ready, hop into the next chapter and let's start talking some heavy theory. 5. White Balance: Okay. Light is everything, not just in food photography, but in all kinds of photography. So, a good photographer is not somebody who simply has a better camera or knows how to tweak their settings better than you. I mean, sure, settings do matter. But what matters more than anything is light. And a good photographer understands not only the behavior of light and the theory behind light, but also how they can utilize the light to their advantage to create a really appealing photo or a certain style. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take you through, let's call it a crash course in light theory. You can really grasp these concepts and learn eventually how you can use that light in the photography that we're going to do later on. Come here for a second. Let's talk about this. All light carries a certain temperature with it. This temperature is measured in Kalvin. Okay. Based on this temperature, your photo might lean more toward the blue side or the orange side. You might have noticed this if you've taken photos in the past and seen that each picture looks different in color. This is where white balance comes into play. WB. Now, cameras need a way to read this temperature. Okay. How the camera interprets the temperature is what we call white balance. The aim of white balance is to make sure the settings on the camera are set according to the temperature of the light. If done correctly, the whites in the camera should look like clean whites. This paper should look like clean white. If your whites in the photo look blue or orange, your white balance is off. Now, don't let this scare you too much. I know this is a lot of technicalities to take in, but it's easy once you grasp it. See, most cameras, especially phones have great auto white balance features. Which means that the camera will automatically try to balance for the whites in the image to make the image look neither to orange nor to blue. In most cases, if you are using an iPhone or an android, you should have a pretty good white balance feature already built in, you probably don't have to tweak anything at all. But the thing is it's not perfect every time. That means that if you take several sets of photos of say food and you notice that each one of those photos have a different temperature to it, that means that you're probably going to have to fix that photo and post. This is where this theory comes in so that if you understand this, then later on when we get into the editing, I will start explaining how you can tweak the white balance to balance out the images so they look the same. Now, besides temperature in terms of Kelvin, in white balance, we also have something called tint. Okay. What tint is is essentially your photo, whenever you take a photo, this is just the way that cameras are manufactured, it will lean more toward the magenta side or it will lean slightly more toward the green side. This will always happen necessarily because just the way that the camera sensor takes in information about temperature and light. You will always have an image that is slightly more toward the magenta side or green side. Mind you, this is not the same as with white balance when the image looks a little bit blue or a little bit orange with tint, with green and magenta, we're talking about very slight undertones. It's barely visible to the naked eye, but this is just the way a camera works. Now, in order to see whether or not your photo is leaning more toward the magentas or the greens in the tint is when you open up the editing software, which again, we're going to go through as we are editing the photos. This is just a forward into that. What can help is that you use the tint slider and you start sliding back and forth back and forth between toward the magentas toward the greens, that way, you're going to highlight and see, was it pushing more toward the magentas or was it pushing more toward the greens? Because the naked eye can't really take that in unless you have a really trained eye as a photographer. You can't really see if it's more toward the tinted magentas or a tinted greens. What happens is just that you can just pull the slider in one or the other direction, and then you can see more clearly, is it more magenta? Is it more green? Then the goal of that is to pull the slider ever so slightly in either or the other direction so that the image doesn't look too magenta or too green, so that it's somehow right in between. So when you balance an image, you're first and foremost trying to get it right on set by making sure the white balance is set correctly. In your inbuilt sort of camera on the iPhone, especially, you can't really alter the white balance. You're going to have to do it in post. But what helps is that you can put a white piece of paper, and put it under the same lighting conditions as the food you're going to photograph. If I'm planning on taking photos of the food right here in this table, then I'll first place this white piece of paper, and I'll take a photo of this white piece of paper, and then I'll bring in the food because later on in post, when I white balance according to this white piece of paper, I can then see what temperature settings I have and what tint settings I have, and then I can just apply those settings to the rest of the photos so that the white balance and the tint is identical to each and every one of your food photos. That's a little neat trick that you can use to really make sure that the white balance is set correctly. This was just a little bit of a quick rundown of light theory, color theory and white balance. Now that you know the basics of how light is red, let's now take a look at the behavior of light as we light up a subject, and we're going to do that in the next chapter. 6. Light: A Crash Course: Okay. All right. What we're going to do now is we're going to take a look at the behavior of light according to this little egg holder with a face. We're going to look at the way the light behaves, and we're going to look at the two different types of light, namely soft light versus harsh light. I'll show you through an example. Right now, this egg holder is being lit up by a huge studio lamp that I got going on right here. But what we're going to do is we're going to use the flash or the built in light of the iPhone to demonstrate how light behaves. So we can do this by now looking at the light, but rather looking at the shadows. This is the way that we're going to determine the behavior of that light. And it will matter. Later on, when you either work with artificial light where you have full control over the light source, or when you're working with natural light, whether it be midday, sunrise, sunset, whether it's coming through the window or through the curtains or behind clouds. Those are going to be the differences between soft light versus harsh light. Let's take a look at harsh light first. We're not looking at the light itself because it can be hard to determine the light based on just the light source, but we're rather looking at the shadows. Let me first turn off this studio lamp so that we are in the dark. And we're only illuminating this dollar figure using this flash. Look at that shadow right there. Let's say that it's morning time, then the sun will be very low in the horizon like this rising up. As you can see, this creates very long shadows. Then during midday, typically the sun is right above us and we can see that the shadows are squished closer to the subject. Then of course, during sunset, we have the same thing going on with the low light in the horizon, but it's pointing in a different direction. So in order for you to determine whether or not you're using soft or harsh light, you're looking at the feathering of the shape of the shadow. Because when the shadow has very strong contrast, the edges are very defined. Typically, that means that you're working with very harsh light. Whereas if I now turn on the studio lamp and we take a look at the shadows that are here right now, we can see that the shadows are feathered out. Meaning that the light is very, very soft. Now, why is that in comparison to this lamp right here. Well, that's because my studio lamp has something called a soft box, and that soft box is like a filter where the light shines through that filter and then hits the subject. Goes through an extra step before actually illuminating the subject. The equivalence of that in terms of natural light is when the sun is shining through clouds or through curtains. Because when you have midday sun and it's very harsh, then you have nothing protecting those sun rays from hitting the subject. But then if you have clouds in the way or you have curtains or a soft box or anything else, then going through that extra step will cause the shadows to be very soft. Now, in terms of food photography, typically, what we're looking for is soft light. I would really recommend that you try to aim for working with soft light in at least in the beginning as a beginner or food photographer, Because with harsh light, you're creating very distinct styles, and styles can be very difficult to achieve unless you know exactly what you're doing. We're going to be working with soft light for the most part. We're going to aim for first at home photographing with the controlled light settings with the studio lamps, with additional lights that we have. Then in the restaurant, we're just going to be working with natural light. You get an idea of how you can take good photos using both natural light and artificial light. Now, the next question we have to ask ourselves is, sure, we got the shadows going on here, right? Let me turn off the lighter as well. We got the shadows going on, but is that really flattering? Do we really want shadows in the shot? Wouldn't that sort of reveal that we are using lights to eliminate the subject? Won't that sort of break the illusion of photography? Sure, you could argue that. But at the same time, even with soft light, even with natural light, you will always necessarily have some kind of shadows. What we can do though is amend that by using some sort of bounce on the opposite side, of where the light source is so that more light is bouncing off of a white surface to even out the shadows on the other side ever so slightly, this will make the shadows not as harsh and the contrast not as harsh when taking photos. What you can do to do that is either you can get yourself a bounce card, which is a photography tool that you can use, which is a card with a white side and a card with a black side. If you're using a white bounce, And then you're going to fill in those shadows. If you're using the other side, which is a black bounce, you're going to enhance those shadows and as a result, enhance the contrast of the photo. I will demonstrate this, but we don't necessarily need to use a bounce card. We can just use a white piece of paper. Let's take this white piece of paper to demonstrate. First, let's create a harsh light source like so so that you can really see what's going on here. Now we see the subject is very harshly eliminated, and we also see that there's strong shadows going on back here and a strong contrast on the other side. This black becomes even blacker and there's a harsher contrast going on. Now let's take this white piece of paper, and we're simply going to put it on the other side of that light source. You can see nothing much is going on right now. But if you pay close attention to the black of the backside of this doll, the closer we move with this bound, you can see that it fills in the shadows ever so slightly. The closer I move, the more illuminated that backside becomes of the doll. Okay. See that? This is how you use a bounce card to fill in the shadows and not make them as harsh. This is where you can do when you have full control of light, if you're photographing at home. Maybe not as much if you're in a restaurant, but when you do have full control, then you can use some bounce to fill in those shadows. And if we wanted to do the opposite, we would simply use something like a black book. We'll take this book as an example. We'll set up the same lighting conditions like so. But instead of a white fill, we're going to have a black fill. What happens then is that the black color of this book will swallow the light on the other side rather than bounce it off and you can see that the shadows on the back of the head of this doll are much more prominent than they were previously. This is a way to create an even harsher contrast you look if that's what you're going for. But like I said, for this purpose, we are going to aim at creating, let me just turn on this slide. We are aiming to create a soft look with the food photography to make it look as natural as possible and to hide the fact that we are illuminating it using artificial lights. Because depending on well your photos or the type of client they are working with, they might ask you to either do soft light or harsh light in a particular style. That's why it's good to go through this theory. So that you can make those conscious choices and shoot more with intent in your photography. I hope that this demonstration with my partner in crime, this lovely little doll helped you understand the concept of the behavior of light, shadows, and bounce cards. Now let's move on to the next segment where we're going to be talking about artificial lights and natural light respectively and how we can use both of those in our favor. 7. Using Artificial Lights: Okay. Okay. So next up, we're going to be talking about artificial light versus natural light. We're going to start off with artificial light. Now, what is artificial light. Artificial light is simply an added light that is made by humans. Something that isn't from nature. In this case, we have an already artificial light going on behind us, and I'm also sitting in front of the window, which you might think is already natural light. However, it's not the window light that I'm using. I'm using a studio lamp to fill in that light. To show you the difference, let me turn off this lamp right here so I can showcase exactly what it looks like if I were to take in just the natural light from the window. So I do have windows here. But what I'm doing is I'm filling in that light from the windows using a studio lamp. Now, why do I do that? Well, it's preferable that every light source is going to be somehow motivated. So if you have a window, then place that additional light artificial light in front of that window to fill in more as motivated by that window and by that light. That's the difference between somebody who's a beginner and who's a pro. A P knows how to use so called practicals, which are those lights behind me right now. Artificial light is good in a way because with artificial light, you are essentially free to control every single setting with your camera. So you can choose the temperature, the Kelvin of that light. In this case, the studio lamps, I know are at a fixed 5,600 kelvin, which is daylight, which for me, that means that I can just set my camera to 5,600 Kelvin and it's always going to be white balanced because they're never going to deviate from that. I go that light, but I also have a back light on this side, illuminating a little bit on the side of my face, as you can see the shadow right here, if I move my hand here. That's because there's an additional backlight over there that I'm using. You can see that more clearly if I turn this off and on, pay attention to my side here. See that? So you can with artificial light, have all the creative freedom that you want, just because you have full control over the light setup. With the white balance, with where you place the lights, how you rotate them around the subject, or how you place the subject around those lights, everything is within your control. And that's what's good about using artificial lights. The downsides of using artificial lights is that, well, if you really want to achieve a particular effect with a particular quality, you probably need some kind of budget to achieve that. So for instance, my studio lamp is really large, but on top of that, I have a really large soft box because the larger the soft filter is around that light source, the softer the light is going to be. So if I were to use a really cheap lamp, that's like this tiny, I actually have one right here. I'll show you. If I were to use this right here, which is just a small added light, and I turned this on, you can see that the light source is much, much harsher. That's because the light source is smaller, and the diffusion on that will also necessarily be smaller. And therefore, that softness of the light isn't going to have as much of a good effect as if I used a large light source with a large soft box. The large light sources with good quality, with large soft boxes, come at an expensive price. There's ups and downs to artificial light. The good part is, you are in full control. The bad part is, it can get expensive, really, really quick, or you can just improvise with small lights and do the best of the situation that you can do. But if you think about large light sources with good natural diffusers that are bigger than any studio lamp on the planet, then we have to look beyond our planet and look at the sun. And that's what we're going to talk about next, natural light. 8. Using Natural Lights: All right. Next up, we got natural light and all the good sides and downsides of using natural light. First of all, what is natural light? Natural light is exactly what it sounds like. It is light that comes from nature that is naturally there. This includes, you know, sunlight, up in the sky, moonlight. It can be fire. It can be anything that just is caused naturally by nature. What are the upsides of this? Well, first and foremost, natural light is a very strong light source. It is free. And I can also be used as a diffused soft light if the sun is behind clouds, or you can use curtains or any other kind of diffusers by the window to create a softer light from that harsh sun. Natural light will also give you a more authentic look to your photos because you're not using any sort of artificial technology to light up the subject, but instead you just have the natural source of light that our eyes are used to seeing on an everyday basis. Now, there are some downsides to using natural light, And one of those things is that natural light is very unpredictable. You might look at the weather and think that you have it all set and you know exactly what's going to happen. But the truth is you don't know exactly when the sun is going to be shining straight onto that subject and when you're going to have clouds suddenly appearing and showing up in the middle of the frame or have a rogue rainstorm or snow or anything else show up in that frame, which alters and this is the bad side of it. It alters the light source and therefore alters the photo that you're taking. So you can't always rely on natural light. So that's a bit of a downside. Furthermore, you can't really move that natural light source. Unless you wait a couple of hours for the natural light source to move for the sun to move, there's not really much you can do. You're just going to have to adapt to the sun. But the good part about that is that if you're doing things like food photography and you're working with small subjects. You're not working with trying to photograph a building or something very large that you cannot physically move. With food with small subjects, with people, you can always have the freedom to move the subject around. And therefore, you can adapt to that natural light source. And like I mentioned, you can also adapt the light source to be a softer kind of light by placing curtains by the window, by even using a large soft box. If you have that at home and putting it by the window. You can always do something to adapt to that natural light source. There are gives and takes for this, right Some people enjoy and really want to have full control by using artificial light, and other people actually enjoy the process and the challenge behind adapting to the natural light source to show up to a set without a plan and just taking a look at the light and thinking, what can I do creatively to make this scene work. Another small downside that people might consider to be a downside is the temperature. The temperature will also change, not just the harshness of the light, but the temp will change as well, depending on if the sun is just stably in one place or if there's a cloud in the way or something else is going on, then the white balance of your photo will change inevitably as well. This is why when we talked about white balance and we talked about, you know, temperature in Kelvin and tint and all of that. That's why we went through that because when we start taking photos in natural light at the restaurant, there might be some changes there. You take one photo and you might have 5,600 Kelvin. You take the third and fourth photo. Maybe the clouds moved out of the way. We got harsher light. All of a sudden, the temperature is different. But we want consistency in that look and we want all of the photos to look the same, stylistically and temperature wise. That's when it's good to know and understand all these things and how natural light will differ depending on the conditions of it. But as a short conclusion, that's what we have. We have either artificial light that we can use to completely control the setting, or we have to adapt around the second wave, which is using natural light, and then with the understanding of the placement of the subjects, diffused versus harsh light and temperature, then we can control all those settings to create a consistent look all throughout our photos. But both these light sources are legitimate. Some people just prefer to work with artificial lights and some people prefer to work with natural light. It just depends on what your needs are. If you're not in a particular hurry and you're photographing food at home, you might have a dinner party with friends or family or your partner, then it's not really necessary for you to buy large studio lamps and tell them like, hold on, guys. Before you start eating, let me just set up this large studio lamp with 5,600 Kelvin, and I'm going to take this perfect photo. Like you're probably not going to do that, right? Unless you're me. I do that, and my wife gets pretty annoyed sometimes. But otherwise, just use natural light to your advantage. Both ways are legitimate. Light is something that you can talk about forever and ever. I've even read a book about a cinematographer in Hollywood who at the age of 70 wrote a book and basically just said he's still learning about light. Light is such an extensive topic. It's a very complex topic. And this is not a master course in light particularly. So I'm going to drop it right here. We've talked about uncovered white balance, temperature, artificial light, natural light, soft light, harsh light. I think we can stop right here and move on to another important function of photography, which will make your photos either flattering or bad. And that is how you compose a shot and what composition really is. So let's talk about that next. 9. Composition Technique: Symmetry. We all like some symmetry. It's not only just pleasing to the eye, but it's also a form of organization within the frame or whatever we're looking at to make sense of what it is that we see and what the person who created that symmetry wanted us to see. This, of course, also applies to photography. In photography, we call it composition. Similar to symmetry, composition has the same goals. You see, it's not just the way to create a certain organization within the frame. But it is also to serves a purpose to direct the eyes of our audience where we want the attention to be in the process, create a very symmetrical, beautiful looking, appealing image. Because think about it, in photography, you essentially have one single frame to tell a story. What do you do with that frame? Because you don't really have more time or more frames. If you add more frames on top of each other, then you have something called motion picture. That's where we get into video. Now, there's plenty of composition techniques out there. But we're going to be focusing on the main one that they teach you in school, namely the rule of thirds. Come with me over here and I'll show you in practice what the rule of thirds is and how we can utilize it in our photography. Okay. So, ladies and gents, what I've done right now is I've taken on another actor. This time, we have a suit ball from ima zaki's spirited away. Obviously, not sponsored by Studio Ghibli in any way. But what this suit ball will do is it will serve as the subject that I will frame using the rule of Thirds. Starting off, let's put up the grid line in front of you right now so you can see what we're working with. You've probably seen this on your phone or another camera that you've used in the past. What the rule of Thirds is is a compositional rule in which you place the subject somewhere within those three blocks that you can see on the screen right there. What you do is you place the subject, depending on where it's looking. In this case, we have eyes. Food obviously doesn't have eyes, so it's a bit different, but you can still use the rule of thirds to compose for that. But I'll show you with this as not a human subject, but a subject that has eyes. What I'm going to do right now is I'm going to stand up using the grid system that we have right here. You can see the three blocks that should approximately be here, here and here. You can choose to place the subject either on one side, in the middle or on the other side. On the other side. You can also see that in this grid system, we also have lines going like so I can't do this properly, hold on. And so we have horizontal lines and we have vertical lines. Where those lines meet, we have those crossing points right there, right there, right there, and right there. That's usually what we call the eye line. We can place the subject If it's looking from. If it's looking this way, then we want to place the subject in this block right here, looking toward nothingness. Why do we do this? Well, because if somebody or something is looking in a certain direction, we want to give the audience the impression that they're looking toward that direction. That's why we leave empty space in the direction that the subject is looking. Okay. If the subject is looking straight ahead, then we can compose for the middle. In that case, it can be on the bottom middle in the middle middle or in the top middle above the line. Okay. And same thing applies if the subject is looking this way, then we compose the subject on this side, leaving empty space here, and the same principle applies. It can be on the bottom side, it can be in the middle, or it can be above the line. So it differs a little bit depending on, like I said, what the subject is. When it's a person, then you keep your eye level slightly above those lines that we mentioned right here. If for instance, you're photographing landscape or you're photographing a bird flying out in the horizon in the distance somewhere, then you can place that subject, in this case, a bird, which is going to be very small on the screen. You can place that bird right on the crossing point. So like right on here. We'll turn this around and pretend it's a bird. Right up here on that x line or in the middle or on the side, you can compose in any of these three blocks. Typically, it's not as pleasing if you just place the subject bam straight in the middle like this. It's rarely ever interesting unless you're shooting some CV or Linked in portrait photos where the subject is supposed to be looking straight ahead on the camera. Then you can do that. It's more for like corporate shoots. But typically you want to create the frame in a more interesting way. So that's why you place it according to the eye level. And if it doesn't have any eyes, such as, you know, food photography, then just make sure to compose it in one of those three blocks. Typically speaking, it's going to be in the middle, especially if you're doing food photography where you're photographing with an overhead shot, then you probably want it to be composed bam straight in the middle. Now, what I would like for you to do is pick any suit ball that you have at home, any subject, anything. It could actually be a person, if you like, or an object. It might be easier to work with an object and try these compositional rules out. Photograph for yourself or upload it for us to see. But basically, the rule of thirds, you can choose play around with composing on one side, on the other side, in the middle, and on the crossing points above, here, here, wherever you want. And also experiment with it because sometimes you can see and notice that rules are meant to be broken, right? You don't always have to compose mathematically correct the way that they teach you at school. It doesn't matter, really. But this is just a general guideline for what the human eye, generally speaking, finds to be pleasing, and especially if you're working with clients and you're planning on freelancing and getting paid for this, a client won't necessarily know and tell you that, oh, wait a minute, you've composed this not according to the rule of thirds and you placed it a bit on this side or that side or whatever. A client is not going to know that, but a client will feel that something is off. This is because we're used to watching things this way by looking at movies, going to galleries, and seeing photographs. This is just a rule that has sort of emerged throughout the past 100 years of photography and film. So in order for you to try to decompose a shot on purpose because you find that particular shot in that particular setting with that particular subject to be pleasing, you first have to know the rules in order to know exactly why you're doing what you're doing. Remember, we always go back to shooting with intent. Once you know the rules, then you can have the intention of breaking those rules and creating your own style or rule according to which you want a photograph. 10. Learning Camera Settings: Okay. Like I said, there are three ways of light intake in a camera, and I'll try and keep this very, very concise just so you can get the basics of it. These three ways are ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. Now, a camera takes in light through the lens when using aperture. A camera takes in light using the camera's sensor when using ISO and same with shutter speed. Now what are all these three things? To keep it very, very concise, if you increase the ISO, you brighten up the image. But mind you, it is not the same as adding a light source. It's not the same as if you had a lamp and you brighten up the scene that way. Instead, it's already using the pre existing lighting conditions and amplifying them. That's why ISO works more like a signal boost rather than adding actual light. What happens if you try and force that signal boost and you crank that ISO up to really force the image to brighten up? That's when everything else in the image also cranks up and you get as a result, something that we call noise. Noise always looks bad, and it's basically the image breaking apart because you're trying to force it to brighten up when you don't have additional light sources there. In order to combat this, you need to add more light. This is why when I mentioned earlier in the lighting section, light is everything. Because you can know all the settings, you can have the perfect setup, but if you don't light your image properly, and it's too dark and you crank up that ISO, you will break that image. The second thing was aperture. With aperture, this is not going to apply to the iPhone, because the iPhone uses AI to simulate the effects of aperture, and it's not actual aperture. So what is aperture? With aperture, basically you measure it in F stops. If you go in lower F stops, then the image will brighten up because the aperture of the lens is going to open up and let a ton more light in. However, then in that case, if you open it up, you're going to get a very out of focus background, which could be very pleasing, but it also means that if you want to show what's going on in the background, then opening up that aperture is probably not a good idea. And similarly, if you increase that aperture, your image is going to turn darker, but therefore, you're also going to have everything else in focus. This is really good for something like landscape photography. Or if you're photographing, like I mentioned, overhead shots of food, you probably want all of that food to be in focus. That's when you have to increase the aperture to make sure that everything else is in focus. But like I said, on the iPhone, I don't know about the Android, but on the iPhone, It's just simulating the effects of the blurriness of aperture being low or high, but it will not actually brighten up or darken your image. So it doesn't work like real aperture. Just keep that in mind when you use aperture on the phone. And finally, we have shutter speed. Shutter speed is essentially measured in fractions, fractions of a second. And the closer you get to that second mark, so the smaller the fractions are, the brighter your image will be, and the more fractions you have, 100th, one, 200, 500th of a second, the darker your image will be. Now, what are the gives and takes of this? With that, with shutter speed, you're going to introduce motion blur. If you go all the way down to the 1 second mark in shutter speed, then when you snap a photo, you'll notice that anything that moves in the frame is going to have that motion blur, and the image will look out of focus. So those are the gifts or takes with using shutter speed. If you really want to freeze everything, then you should increase that shutter speed to really make sure that everything is frozen. But then you're going to get a darker image, and you have to compensate for that light intake by using the other settings. All of these are just very technical terms that you use essentially in a real camera. But when it comes to your iPhone, you don't really have to pay too much attention to all of this unless you're using a third party software, which I will be doing, namely the built in camera of Lightroom mobile, then you can actually control some of these things fully. But on the iPhone, generally, I think on the Android as well, you're just going to have something called exposure and you drag that exposure slider to the left or right to make the image brighter or darker and you should be fine just doing that. In case you want to have some kind of blurry in the background, then you can use the aperture feature on the built in camera on the iPhone to simulate the effect of a blurry background. And you already have this as a preset on your iPhone if you use portrait mode. So all you're going to do in that case is press the little F button in the top corner, and then you can choose the intensity of the aperture. And as you can see, when you go lower in numbers, the blurinss in the background is going to intensify. And when you go up, then most things are going to be in focus. I know I already said that this is not something that you really have to think about when doing iPhone photography with food. But if this does interest you and you want to read more about ISO shutter speed and aperture and exactly how it affects your image so that you can have full control of your image in case you're photographing using a real camera, then you can go on my website with the provided link and download a PDF diagram which shows you exactly the effects of what happens when you affect the shutter speed, what happens when you affect the aperture, and the ISO. So in that case, you can really take a look at it and know how you can set your settings exactly for the type of effect that you want to achieve when photographing and what the pros and cons are going to be with each setting that you meddle with. But if you feel you don't need any of that, you just want to shoot with the phone, then keep going because now we're going to be talking about angles. 11. Flattering Angles: Lighting composition and settings aside. There's one more thing you need Angles. Angles are a way for you to keep things interesting. It is going to be the perspective that you choose a person to see or view the frame. Perspective is very important because it makes us feel something. Imagine you're photographing a portrait of someone and you're taking a photo of them from below. In other words, the person is looking down on the camera. That will give the impression that the person is very domineering, very authoritative. However, if you photograph somebody from above looking up at the camera, they look small and meaningless. We will feel different based on the perspective that the camera gives us or the photographer gives us. By viewing everything at a normal angle that you would expect anybody to see, it becomes boring eventually. When it comes to food photography, there's only really about three angles that you need to really make it work. The first being the one that you're seeing right now, an overhead shot. And lucky you for using an iPhone because you don't have to do a complex rig the way that I did with this camera. With an iPhone, you can simply hold up the phone above the food like this and take an overhead shot. It doesn't have to be any more difficult than that. Why do we do that? Well, because typically food is placed on plates, and plates are placed on the table like this, and we would ideally like to see everything that the menu has to offer. And we can only capture that by taking an overhead shot. The second shot that you might need is a shot from the POV of the person eating the food. So you're simply placing the phone from the point of view of somebody sitting at the table and looking at the food. Now, you can do this either from a wider perspective and make it really subjective or you can move in a bit closer, but just angle it in such a way that the person is viewing the food. But you move in closer with the camera or zoom in with the camera to get a bit of a medium shot or close up shot. That way, the viewer is observing the food from the point of view as if they were sitting in the restaurant having ordered that food themselves. And the third and final shot that you might need is details. Any kind of detail shots. So first, you might have a plateful of food that you wanted to take a picture of as a whole. But then maybe you want to move in a bit closer and take a photo of just the drink or just a piece of tomato or just the side of the steak. Detail shots that you can move in real close to so that the viewer senses as if the food is extremely close to their face almost to the point that they can smell it. This is when we start moving into photos that you can taste, and we're only going to accentuate that kind of level of taste later on in the editing. But everything starts from set. So first, start off with an overhead shot, practice this at home. Overhead shot, then as a second shot, move in from the POV of somebody sitting at the table as you take a photo of the food, but make sure that there's no fluff on the sides, make sure that you don't see maybe too much of the table or too much of the background. Remember, the food is the focus. So if you have to move a bit closer or zoom in, but delete everything else around that is a distraction and Third shot. The detail shot, and this is up to you, depending on what you've cooked, depending on where you're drinking, depending on what else is on the table, if there's a pre course, main course or dessert, whatever you prefer, but moving close and take a detail shot as well. Practice this for a little while so you can really get into the habit of photographing using various angles. This way, when somebody looks at those three photos, they really experience them as three separate photos because three different things are happening in those photos, thanks to the angles that we've chosen. That's how you keep things interesting. 12. The Power of Styling: So when it comes to the basics of the camera, you've nailed everything. You have an understanding of camera settings of lighting, of composition, and of angles. And remember, keep those things always mixed up to make things interesting, always change up the composition, change up the angle, change up the settings depending on the angle and the composition and change up the lighting and the subject in relation to that lighting. This is the way that you keep photography alive and continuously make something interesting so that no two shots look the same. What is there left to do? Well, now you got all the technicalities down. Now it's time to get a little bit creative. And this is in terms of creating something that adds a bit of magic to the shot you're taking. You can do this in several ways, for instance, by adding props. If you're photographing food, let's say you've made a bowl of soup and you're photographing that food. Well, you could definitely photograph the bowl with soup and nothing else around it. But that can get a little bit boring. Instead, think about what kind of props you can add to that shot to make it more interesting. Maybe a wooden spoon. Maybe a napkin, maybe a candle, maybe anything that could just add to the story that you're telling. However, it should be relevant to the food that you're photographing. If you're taking a shot of something and you notice that there's cell phone on the table, there's car keys. There's other fluff that just doesn't belong to the story you're telling in that photo, remove it, get rid of all the fluff and only add props that you feel can add something to the photo. However, make sure that whatever you're adding is not too distracting because remember, you want the eyes to be on the subject, the bowl of soup. So props is one way to do it. The second way to do it is think about the background. The background, either as an overhead shot or on the side in a normal angle, should be something interesting and complimentary to the food as well. One way to think about this is to think about texture. So, as you've seen earlier, the table that I've filmed most of these things on is a very light sort of wood. That is very pleasing to the eyes, especially when it comes to food. It gives you this impression of late night dinner, and it's very cozy, as opposed to, for some kind of laminated plasticky material that just doesn't cut it. Like the subject could still be interesting, but it takes away from the photo if I photograph using a boring background or boring texture. But texture can be found everywhere. It doesn't have to be the table that you're using. It can be something placed on the table, and then subsequently, the food is placed on that. So it could be some kind of sheet, some kind of a curtain, some kind of paper. You can even get backdrops that you buy, like small cheap backdrops from Amazon that you can put on the table to fake that your table is made of a different material. There's plenty to choose from. I have a set of ten different backdrops of different wooden kinds. But then you can also buy backdrops that mimic some kind of stone, for instance, which can be really cool if you're for instance, photographing cheese plates or something like that. So it depends on what is pleasing to the type of food that you're making And the third and final way to add something extra is to think about complimentary colors. We don't want too many different colors in one shot. Typically, if we're photographing food, we would like the colors to be to work well together and not be too many of them. So we don't want pink foods, purple foods, green foods, together with yellow foods and red foods and blue foods. And it's just going to be a little bit too much, right? So try to keep it very minimal. But keep the colors complimentary. You might be wondering, well, how the hell do I do that? I'm not a designer. I don't know what is a complimentary color. Well, thankfully, there's an easy way to approach this because I'm not a designer myself. But you can go for instance and search for adobe color wheel on the Internet or look at your editing software in the color grading section where you see the color wheel, think about it like this. Complimentary colors are the equivalent of if you choose one color, for instance, blue, the complimentary color to that is going to be on the opposite side of that color wheel. So if it's blue, then on the opposite side of that color wheel is going to be orange or yellow or red. And if you have magentas and purples, the opposite of that would be some kind of shade of green. And if you don't want to get too technical about it and don't want to think about complimentary colors, I guess, mathematically, the way they're supposed to be, just look at any kind of colors that work for you that you think look pleasing and use those in your shot. So if your food typically doesn't include, I don't know, tomatoes, but you feel like you need something red to add to make it more interesting, then add tomatoes. Why not? You don't have to eat it that way. But for the sake of photographing that food, you can add some more colors, add a little bit of sides. Maybe some greenery with salad, tomatoes for red. Yellows for banana. Whatever seems to work with the color scheme you're working with of the type of food that you've picked together with the background, the texture, and all the angles and composition and all of that together. Because once you put all of those things, once you nail all the aspects correctly, then you're going to get a really, really pleasing photo because it's all in the details in photography. You can make a huge difference in just taking a photo regularly and then applying all of these things in the little details to make it really, really interesting. And I'm going to show you all of this visually as we cook food at home and photograph it the way that a Newbie would versus a P and the same thing when we go to the restaurant. So you can really see how applicable all these things are and that you should never underestimate the little details. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have concluded all of the theory that we could possibly talk about before starting to shoot some food. Okay. What we're going to do next is when my wife gets home, she will be making a lunch meal that we will be photographing, and that will be the conclusion of day one. And then on day two, we're going to move on and go to the restaurant and photograph there as well. So I hope you're as excited as I am because now it's time to cook some food. 13. Cooking at Home: When we wake. Here the birds and see the sun. Side aside, our fears are done. All the good time has just begun. What we have, let's hold on tight. Found what we're looking for in life. Call us crazy, but things are finally right. With you and I the future is bright. You we garden. We don't need no more. Even in the hotel. So 14. Home Photography: All right, ladies and gents, we now have this summery salad that we're going to be working with. It looks beautiful just on its own. But now we're going to make it a lot better. The first thing we want to look at right now because this example from home is an example of what you can do if you have full control over absolutely everything. Whether you want to just shoot it for your own sake and for Instagram or if you want to work with this professionally. The first thing we want to look at is just the type of food that we have. Right here, we can see that the food has a lot of greens, yellows, reds, very naturish kinds of colors going on. So we want to compliment that with everything around that, such as background, textures, props, and then in the end, angles, composition, and so on and so forth. So before we even take out the camera and take a look at what we're working with. First, we're going to take a photo just like this. So let's say we're sitting at a table. This is the way a newbie will do it. We get the food served. We're not going to have a huge studio lamp. So we're going to turn that off And then we're going to take out the camera. And we'll just take a photo the way that anybody would. Like, you get the food at the table, you take a photo of it, and there you go. This is my food for whatever for Instagram that you're going to upload. After we've done that, now we can start prepping the entire setup. We're going to start off with the light itself. I'm using a huge studio lamp here, which mimics daylight at 5,600 Kelvin with a soft box that's going to diffuse the light and make it soft. The reason I'm doing this is because typically speaking in food photography, you want to go for a natural sort of look. So we're pretending as if the light source is coming from a window. Now, I could have just placed this food close to a window and done it that way, but we're not going to do that because at home we have full control. Later on, when we go to the restaurant, we're probably going to have to work with natural setting as much as possible because we're not going to have as much control as we do at home. But now that we do have full control, we're going to start off with the light source placing it sort of above the food to make sure that everything is being illuminated evenly. And in an ideal situation, you would probably rig this light directly overhead. But that's a very complicated rig that I don't expect a lot of people to be able to do or want to put the effort into doing. So instead we're doing this, the second best option. Next up, we're looking at the background. Now, with the background, we do have a pretty decent looking light wooded table. This could work as a background or as a sort of texture which suits the sort of nature theme that we're going for here. But if you want to go the extra mile, you could get and I got these from a Swedish store, but I'm sure you can get these from Amazon or something. Simple cheap backdrops. I bought a pack of five, and on each side of these, there is a different design. So in a pack of five, you technically get ten designs. And having looked at all of these, I've already decided that this is the one that I want to go for, which also has this sort of light woodeny feel to it, but it also has some other textures that could be very interesting. And it will give you the impression as if we're sitting outside somewhere, maybe by a park bench or maybe by a cafe outside, and it can really sort of elevate the look that we're going for. So the first thing you want to do is just set up the backdrop. And the thing is, these are very, as you can see, bendy so you would have to Actually, I prefer this side. So you would have to put some heavy weights on it to make sure that it's properly stabilized. And for that, I've prepared some random rocks that I have at home, right here, right here. We're going to push this up a little further. And on the other side, I have a miniature sewing machine and a bottle of olive oil. And this way, now we get a pretty straight backdrop. Now we're going to place the food on top. Now we have a pretty good beginning. I'm going to show you what this looks like through the camera. So now we have added lights, and we have added a backdrop. As you can tell, the image is already looking very, very good. This is very interesting. However, it could be much better. See what you want to do with food photography, Is you want to add relevant props to the food that you're serving. We could just take a picture like this, right? But it's not that interesting because we have a lot of empty space on the sides and it's just a plate of food. Now, what could we add here to elevate this food and make it even more interesting, especially if you're doing commercial food photography. If a company hires you to do something, you wouldn't just take a photo like this and call it quits. Anybody can do that, right? So instead, let's take a look at this. We have this natural thing going on. So what I've prepared is first a lemon and I've sliced up into two pieces like this, and the other half is a whole lemon. Then we could also add some chili to really accentuate that flavor and maybe go for a more hot look in terms of this summery salad. I've also prepared some seeds. The seeds can just be placed sprinkled a little bit on the side, so maybe we'll add some on this side as well. Like that. And then finally as a final touch, I've prepared some sea salt, some raw sea salt, then we can just sprinkle on the sides here. Because all of this plays into the part of the food because this is what we're making food with. This is the sort of ingredients that we're working with and it suits the purpose. Like you wouldn't really go for I don't know, a bottle of coke in the middle of the shot. It's just going to look like you're doing a sponsored shoot. Instead we're just using raw materials that the food consists of to use them as props. Taking a look at the shot now, we can see that this is much more interesting. Much more. We can just move things around a little bit so we can make sure that everything is visible properly. This way, for instance, by turning the pepper, we can see that it's going in the direction or in the shape of the plate. These seeds could be moved around a little bit. The salts could be spread out a little more. Perhaps we move the lemon up like so. Doesn't always have to be straight and symmetrical, as long as it looks good, as long as you're satisfied with the shot. And these seeds as well, this makes for a really interesting shot. Now, that was just a reference look into all of this. I'm now opening up the light room camera app to use this instead because with this one, we could gain full control over the shot. We have manual setting selected on the virtue of pressing this button right here where it says, professional or automatic. We could go for automatic and just sort of let the phone handle all the settings. But I'm going to go for professional. And right now on the letter T here, we can see this is a telephoto. We could change this to a wide angle, so we get a better look like so. And then we start going into the settings. First, we have exposure. Now, exposure is not what you think. You might think that exposure is just ISO, you're bringing up the brightness of the image. It's not. This is called exposure to compensation. It means that after you've already set all the other settings, you could use exposure compensation to sort of force the camera to read the light in a stop less or a stop more. I wouldn't even use this unless you're really advanced and you know what you're doing. So I'm just going to leave it at that. And then we have shutter speed. Remember with shutter speed, you're introducing motion blur if you go too low. So right now our shutter speed is set to auto. I'm going to change this to let's say if it's one out of 320, that I could pretty much move my hand around as much as possible, and it's going to be relatively frozen. But if I take a photo with a shutter speed of 1/25, and I do this, you can see that the photo turned out to be blurry. So you want to be careful with Shutter speed. You want to generally keep it at double the frame rate of whatever you're shooting. So if your camera is shooting at 25 FPS, then you want to have it at 50. If it's shooting at 30, then you want to have it at 60 and so on. And the higher you go, the more stable the shot it's going to be. So if I want to be absolutely certain, let's do say one or over 200th of a second because then I can really move around, and I'll be pretty safe. Then we get ISO, which right now is on auto, but I could manually just change this to make sure that I'm exposing this exactly the way that I want. I'm going to go all the way up and then work my way down and see what happens. ISO 250, ISO 160. Let's see what seems to work. In my favor, let's do ISO 200. Now, with white balance, You could keep it at auto. And if you really want consistency throughout all your shots, then choose one of the presets. We got tungsten, we got fluorescent, we got daylight, we got cloudy, or we have this pen drop tool, which means all you have to do is select a blank surface which has the color white, and then the white balance will be set correctly according to that white color or that white piece of paper, as long as the white piece of paper is under the same light source. So I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to pick one of the presets. In this case, I'll just do daylight because this is daylight, and I can tell the image is slightly warmer than it should be. But it doesn't matter. I'm just looking for that consistency. So we're going to have an easier time in the editing. After that, I'm just going to start with the overhead shot. Remember, we want three shots. It could be more, it could be less, whatever you feel like. One establishing shot from above, one shot from the position of where somebody is sitting and then moving into some detail shots that could be looking good. We're just going to improvise this. So let's start with the overhead shot where we introduce all the food and everything. This is probably the most popular type of shot that you've seen on Instagram. And all you got to do is just snap the photo. Now that we have everything prepared. You just got to snap. There we go. I'll take a few options. Now, I could also change to the tele lens. The wide. Oh, there's supposed to be a ultra wide option as well, but maybe it's not available when using DNG. But with the tele lens, I would have to move further up like so to really capture that shot. Like so. Let's take a look at it. Not really satisfied. I'm going to take another one. And if you really have to, you could stand in a chair, stand on a table, whatever you feel like, things that we are not going to be able to do in a restaurant setting. I prefer the white shot, so I'm just going to do a few more of these. There we go. We're done with the overhead shot. Now let's move into a bit of a POV. I'm sort of sitting on the table, and I just got served type of shot, which can be right there. Sort of like so. This could make for an interesting shot as well, and then we'll move in and do some close ups. Now, what you could do with these is you can just simply take a close up photo of the food like so. You could take another one just so we can have it. Another close up overhead shot. But what you can do is you can place objects or relevant subjects in front of a frame and shoot the food through something. So have something in the foreground and take a photo of the food behind it. So for instance, we could use, for instance, this bottle of olive oil. Let's see what this looks like. I'm not even sure. We could take a photo of the food through this. We just have to angle this properly so the table doesn't show in the background. This could make for an interesting shot as well. Or we could use the corner of a frame, so we could just move in close like this and take a detailed shot of the peppers, as well as the food there on the side. Maybe we can do the same on this side with the lemons. So that only part of the shot is composed. See, this is why it's good to know the rule of thirds and compositional rules because now we can break them with intention. Remember, everything that you do should be with intention so that you know why you're doing something. Otherwise, you're just going to take thousands of photos and then find one that you like, which could turn out to be good, but what was the point of taking those thousands of photos if you didn't know what you were doing, right? So we can do the seeds as well. You can do this. Let's see if we can get something interesting off of with the salt up here. All of these are just added detail shots that could make for some really interesting photography. So in short, these are sort of the things that you want to think about. The foundations, as you can see, are very, very important because then when you have full control over doing something, you're going to know exactly like this is sort of the way I want to angle this, how I want to compose this, what kind of necessary props I can pick up. Otherwise, every shoot would take days to complete. If you're just going to go around and experiment. It's good to experiment, but as long as it's within the framework of knowing what's up, knowing what you want to do and why it might work and what might not be so favorable. Because I could try and, you know, just put any other object in front here, but it's not going to be relevant. Like, I can't put the sewing machine in the middle of the frame because it doesn't make any sense. Everything from the props, the background, the texture, the colors, everything that we talked about in the theory section should complement the food that you're taking photos of. So if I were to photograph, not this summery salad, but it would be a very properly, like, medium rare steak from a steakhouse, then I probably wouldn't have, you know, lemon and this lighter shade of wood in the background. Maybe I would want a darker kind of wood. Maybe I would want to go for something like this instead, you know, so you have to just think about what is relevant to the food that you're shooting? What kind of a feeling do you want the audience to feel when they look at that food? Because right now, I'm thinking I'm looking at this, and I'm looking at the photo, and I'm just thinking, Oh, God, I would like to have, like, a glass of cider or some white wine or, like, I want to sit outside on the beach somewhere. Like, that's the feeling that this food is selling us. So we have to complement that in conjunction to the food and all the ingredients. We're going to pause this right here, and we're going to start talking about the next section we're going to go into. Today is now the completion of day one. And day two is going to consist of going to the restaurant and having a chef cook us a food so that we photograph out in public. And what's that going to mean? It means that we do not have access anymore to fancy lights, fancy backgrounds, raw ingredients that we can put in the frame. So the difference here is, what can you do when you have full control, IE at home versus what can you do when you have to spontaneously take a photo when you're out with friends and how you can make the best out of that situation. So get a good night's rest, and then tomorrow we'll come back and we'll go to Ada Zone, a vegan gluten free restaurant in Stockholm. 15. Special Restaurant Visit: Aida's Zone: Okay. Hello, and welcome to My zone. My name is Ida, and I'm the owner of this vegan and gluten free restaurant. Today we will be making Cheval a traditional Bosnian dish that is usually made with meat. But today we are making it vegan and gluten free. So come with me to the kitchen for an exclusive behind the scenes experience. But I am done. Yeah, I'm done. Let him go of my head. Nobody's go. To take as a goal stronger than faded. It's not shade do that. Setting up a goal to grow from a part. It's all about domestic who we are. Nobody's go to me a right. Stand up and take a stronger than Sad It's not a shade but all 16. Restaurant Photography: Okay. And here we go. We have this lovely Bosnian traditional dish that we're going to be working with. Now, a few things to think about before starting the photography session, we have to first take a look at the setting that we're in. If it's in your control, ask to be seated close to a natural source of light. In this case, we have large windows on my right side and probably your left side. If you can't be seated next to a window, then perhaps a seat which has strong overhead lights or any kind of light source really that is strong enough that looks pleasing to photographing this type of food. Now, the next thing you want to look at is the texture, the background, and like I talked about earlier, the fluff that exists. In on the table. So right here, we can see, for instance, we have a wine or a cocktail kind of glass? I probably won't use that, so I'll take it away. We also have this salt and pepper thing, which I think is just a little too clunky and doesn't really contribute to the shot that much, and it's just white and kind of boring. So we're going to remove that too. Then we have a glass. Unless this is filled with some kind of interesting cocktail or drink, it's not really necessary, plus the food is the main focus, and main subject. So I'm going to remove that as well. What are we left with? We have the cutlery, which is placed inside a napkin. This could actually work. It contributes to the story and doesn't attract too much attention, and it's flat on the table next to the food. This might work and we might use this. Then finally, we have this, which at first glance, you might think this is a good idea because look, it's a beautiful flower. It looks aesthetically pleasing. But we have several problems here. First, we have the problem of this being very tall in relation to the food on the table. The second thing is that the flour doesn't really contribute to the story. I mean, I guess you could add it a little bit just for aesthetic effect, but it's not quite that relevant. I mean, we could combat the sort of the tallness of this by taking it out and placing it next to the food. But again, then all of a sudden, what is the story here? It's sort of it's a distraction from the food itself. So I'm going to choose to not use this either. So now that we've removed all of the fluff. Now we're going to take a look at how we're planning to compose this. We're taking a look at the background, first of all, and we can see that we have this white cloth, which works perfectly fine with the theme of white that we have going on here. We have white bread, we have a white plate, and we have white napkins and shiny sort of cutlery. So it's all going in the direction of that bright sort of theme that's going on here. But you could also take a look at what's under here, and we can see it's a wooden table. That could look good as well. Especially if there are some crevasses like on the actual tablecloth right here, which I can see, maybe there's a bit of dirt. This could be distracting, and unless you're prepared to edit that away later on, then it might be just easier to use what's under it. So let's check out the situation here if we just lift this food and we temporarily remove the table cloth. Now, obviously, think about what is possible, because if you are in a restaurant and it is packed with people, and you've got all sorts of people around you, then you can't really, you know, stand up and start moving things around too much. So keep it simple, remove a little bit of fluff that you have right next to you, immediately right next to you and try and steer clear of attracting too much attention when you do this because it might be considered inappropriate. But in our situation, we have a right now currently empty closed restaurant just for the purposes of this course. So I'm going to choose to use this wooden table as a background. Now, I did say that the whiteness, the theme of white going on here works very well. However, we have these darker brownish, sort of potatoes and the meat, well, not the real meat, but the meat, the vegan meat going on, and that is leaning more toward the brown side. So we could actually go for a brown theme here as well. It could work. So then after you've decided after you've cleaned the fluff, you've taken a good look at the background, the light source, the sort of textures going on, the necessary props. Now it's time to just place the food in a way where you will decide how you're going to compose this and prepare to finally take the shot. Now, I could do this horizontally with the food or I could do it vertically with the food. I think I'm going to opt for the vertical option because the cutlery is also vertical pointing up, so I'm going to do the same with this wavy plate, and this could look really cool. I'm just going to place it right about here. Remember, don't push the limits if you're not really allowed to or if you don't feel comfortable, do whatever you can do to set up the shot. Now that we have it ready right here. Now it's time to take a peek and look at the photo through the lens of a camera. First and foremost, let's see what it would look like originally with everything placed back the way it was. We had this. This is just to imagine what it would look like if you were somebody visiting a restaurant and you would take photos, like I said, the way that a Newbie would, for instance, then you got the food served like so. You got a bit of cutlery on the side, and you would probably just pick up your phone, you're seated right here, for instance, and you're like, Oh, look at this, this looks cool. And you take a photo. Then maybe if you're seated over here and you take a photo, this is the way it would look like with pretty much anybody uploading a photo on Instagram. Now let's remove this and now we're doing it the way that a P would. Now we have removed the fluff, we're composing correctly. We're going to angle this properly. And we're going to do it. Let's see how many shots we're going to be taking, but I'm going to start with the master shot, which is sort of the establishing shot presenting this food in its entirety. So we're going to place it like so, and then I'll take a look at the shot like this. We could also try a wider angle and see if that works. No, no, we see a little bit too much. See, the thing is about using wider angles. Is that if you start moving into closely, you can see that the image becomes distorted. It could work, but it does change the perspective of the shot. Can you see the angles or the corners of the plate here? They're becoming very distorted and the same thing is going to happen to the food. If you're going for something stylistic, you could do that. There's also ultra wide. Now you can really see the distortion. Look at that and look at the way it looks with a regular shot. Now everything is even straight and symmetrical. We're going to go for the regular one and take a photo just like this. Now we're just using auto settings. We can press the Shutter button. If you were to use manual settings, then you go into professional right here, then you have auto white balance or you can change it to daylight, or you can select a neutral source right here. Find something white in the shot to set the white balance correctly so that you can have even white balance throughout all of your shots. Here, we can see that we have a little bit of yellow coming in on the table right there. And what you could do essentially is just to now you can see that with the lights off, we don't have any sort of distracting colors coming into the frame that are not welcome here. And this is not always possible. You can't just walk around turning off lights in a restaurant. But if you have the availability to do that, that will be great. And after this photo, now we're going to take another one with this updated sort of atmosphere that we got going on, like so. And we can see that we have a pretty good photo. I'm just going to compose this a little bit differently. Try and keep things within all these sort of the rule of thirds, all of the squares, if you want a good, proper establishing overhead shot. Now we have a few options available to us right there, and thanks to the auto settings, everything is sort of evenly lit. But you have to remember, auto settings are good, but they will be good for as long as all the lighting conditions around you are good. If we were in the dark, auto settings, and the reason auto settings are kind of an enemy to you is because they will use everything ISO shutter speed and aperture to compensate for the darkness in that image. And what could happen is that in order to compensate for it, the auto settings could choose to meddle with the shutter speed. And you might notice that when people take social event photos like in a bar, dark restaurant or a club, that a lot of the photos turn out to be blurry and people are just like all over the place. That's because the auto settings chose the wrong or not favorable sheter speed settings. But when you use manual settings, you have full control over what you want to sacrifice and what you want to actively use. All right, so we got the first shot ready. Now, let's quickly run through and do all of the other shots. We have that shot. We could have a shot where we are from a seated position, like so, and just pretend like we're looking at this from the chair, so that people, you know, experience this food, like firsthand from a first POV perspective. And then we can do some detail shots, perhaps right here of the meat. We could do a bit of a few shots right here of the sauce. Okay. When talking about texture, we talked about that you can essentially remove things from the table to create a different background, but you can also think about it the opposite way by adding something. So take a good look around you inside the restaurant and see if there's anything else if the natural background is not favorable to you, if there's anything else that you can add to the shot to make it look or enhance the food that's being presented to you. So just looking around here, I found this sort of leafy looking background, which is just part of the decoration of the restaurant. And we could in theory, just snap a few photos like this as well. We place it like so, even though it wasn't part of the original plan, and in fact, I'm going to remove the cutlery altogether, because now we have a green theme going on, which works well with the salad and with the reds as well. We have the browns and the yellows. All of these are earthy colors to begin with. And that's why this background could be very pleasing together with the wooden table. So taking a look at the new setup that we have now, with this leaf going on, this could make for a really, really interesting photo. Take a look at that. Now we found a way to enhance what we already had. Because just having a neutral background, I mean, it works. It looks clinically good. But by adding even more to the shot in terms of texture, we can make it much more interesting and make it look really professional. In this case, I would just lucky to find this piece of decoration here in the restaurant. If you don't have any, then just go for the sort of cleaner look, I guess. But this makes the photo look much more interesting. So we'll take a few photos like this again, we're going to have some some detailed shots going on. So take a few variations. Look at what you can do what already exists at a restaurant, like I said, because when you are in a public place, we don't have the full control that we had at home. We can't really do complicated light setups. We can't really stand on the table and get a proper overhead shot. We can't do that or behave like that out in public, right? So you just have to improvise, and this is the way that you should approach it in that case. Think about windows, natural light sources, think about what you have around you, textures, backgrounds, whatever works in the favor of the food that you're going to be taking photos of. Okay. Now with that being said, now we're going to go home and we're going to edit both sets of photos, the ones taken at home, the ones taken in the restaurant and compare them later on to the Newbie photos so that you can see the strength or the impact of the effect of just switching things around a little bit, using a little bit of details, thinking consciously. Remember, we're shooting with intent, thinking consciously about things like composition and angles and lighting. So when you're ready for that, hop into the next chapter, and let's begin editing. 17. Editing Strategy: Okay. All right. So the second day has finally concluded, we have managed to shoot at home, in a restaurant in different kinds of environments, one in which we have full control and the other one where we had to completely improvise the entire shot. Now comes the part where this is the second side of photography, namely editing. In editing, we're going to be we're going to be using cro mobile and we're going to be looking at a more naturalistic style. We're not going to add any kind of crazy effects or make the food look extremely cinematic or black and white or Wes Anderson like nothing like that. We're just going to enhance the photo in the way that we shot it. Because remember, the other side of photography is editing. But in order for you to edit, you have to first take into account what you've created on set. So if I'm photographing somewhere in the forest, and we've got a lot of greens and we've got a lot of a wooden shed and a dark environment. It will be very hard to edit that photo to make it look like barbie. You know what I mean? So editing has to complement your photography. So now that we've already shot in a naturalistic type of setting, we used very soft light, either through a soft box or using natural light, no harsh shadows anywhere. Now we're going to complement that through the editing process. And we're going to start off by editing the home photos, and then we're going to move on to do the restaurant photos. And after that, we're going to take a look at both comparisons between the edited photos that we've taken when we used a pro setup and the Newbie photos that we took without any preparation whatsoever. Starting off, we're just going to open up the light room. Okay. 18. Full Edit, Part I: Okay. Now, what I've done is I've already made my selects for the session for both sessions. This is just to remove all of the photos that are sort of unwanted that don't look as good. So I'm starting off with the overhead shot of the home. The first thing you want to look at when you edit a photo is just take a good look at what you have to work with. Right now, we have this overhead shot and the little tweaks that we can do before we start editing would have to do mostly with composition. Now, how can we switch this up? I noticed that I took the shot and you can see that the plate is lower down in the frame. That's because I wanted to include the salt up here. By looking at this photo now, it's not as if the salt is very visible. What I'm going to do is I'm going to crop this and remove that salt. I'll move this frame. I'll do it like so we move in a bit closer and delete some of that empty space up there. What you can do when you crop is that you can unlock right here, unlock the frame so you can freely frame this. It doesn't have to be within the exact aspect ratio, like so. Then you can auto straighten by pressing this button right here. We allow the software to recognize where the straight lines are and place the photo accordingly. Like so. Now we have the photo straightened and we've removed some of that salt because the salt is very bright and so is the table behind it. You don't even see why it's cropped that way it was. It looked better in real life. These are just some of the changes that you're going to have to make as you go along and as you notice what a photo looks like onset versus actual result later on in the software. So this is the first photo we got working with. And going for that natural style, we first and foremost have to balance the photo, meaning we first have to expose it correctly because it wasn't perfectly exposed. You could see that it has some very bright areas on the right side, and it's darker on the other side. So to do that, we go into the light section. And we start working with the exposure slider first and foremost. I'm going to start exposing this, so it's generally I'm looking at the shadows now just to make sure that that is my reference point, the left side of the screen. So I'm going to expose it for that. I'm not going to touch contrast right now. I'll do that later. Highlights is only going to affect the highlights of the photo. A photo consists of blacks, shadows, mitts, highlights, whites. The blacks are the blackest point in the image. Then we have the shadows, which are the shadowy areas that we can see in this photo of the left side. Then we have the mid tones, which are neither too bright nor too dark. Then we have the highlights, brighter areas of the image, and then the whites are the peak peak whites. Right now, I can see that we have to touch the highlights. I'm going to move as you can see, if I move the highlights lighter all the way down, the right side of the frame right here is being affected because that's where the highlights are. Okay. And we want to bring those down as much as possible, I think right now to really make sure that the photo looks a little bit more even, and we can do the opposite with the shadows and we can lift them because that means that the right side of the frame, as you can see right there, is going to brighten up. The point is to make the shadows and the highlights meet somewhere in the middle, so it's as balanced as possible. Then we go the whites, and let's see if I start moving the whites around, then we can really even the frame out. So the highlights are not overblown and things look relatively even balanced. By holding in on the photo, you can see the before and after. This was the before. It's a bit more contrasty. It's a bit more bright on the right side and darker on the left, and here's the after. We've balanced the photo the way it should be. After you balance the photo, then you can move in if you wish on the contrast slider to create a bit of a puncher look so that you can really see the outlines and the contours of the food itself. I'm not going to crank this too much. I'm going to do it at plus ten, and that's enough. Next up, if we want to create a certain style with this, we could move into color. However, before we do that, I'm going to go into the tone curve. Now, the tone curve consists of these areas that I talked about. On the left side, we have the blacks and the shadows. In the middle, we have the mid tones. On the further right side, we have the highlights and on the very top, we have the whites. Meaning that if I create points like this, it gives me the freedom to completely control those specific areas. If I'm moving this around, you see this is only affecting the blacks, and the next point would be the shadows, then we got the mid tones, then we got the highlights, and then we got the peak whites right up there. Okay. Now, I'm going to just reset this. By double clicking on the points, you can reset them back to the original point. And looking at this, I like the look of usually when you do food photography, you might notice on Instagram and stuff that they use a very faded look by adding a bit of a fade, and that means bringing those blacks up. Just by creating these points, I can now move the blacks up and you can see that now I'm creating this faded effect. That's typically what you do in food photography, and I'm going to go for that typical look so you can get that Instagram worthy look to your food photography. If I want to bring the shadows down a little bit, right here, that will create even more of a contrast look in the shadow area. And then we can move over to the mid tones to make, as you can see, on the fruit itself, it's popping. It's creating a bit of a pop look. And we can do the same with the highlights, but we're going to bring those down instead, I think. We're not going to make it too bright, like and then on the absolute whites, we're going to bring them down as well. The reason we're bringing them down is because like I said, on the right side of the frame, the image is a little too bright, and we have to work around that. I'll press on done, and then we're going to work more on the bright sides of the image later on. But right now, let's start working with style. In terms of white balance, as we shot it, it looks pretty good, but we could change some of the presets. We can move over to auto, for instance, or daylight. But we can see daylight gives a warm look. I wouldn't recommend trying to create a look by changing the white balance too much. So for instance, if I want to blue or look, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way by changing up the white balance. Instead, we want full control of degrading ourselves. So make sure you always start with a neutral white balance, even if you're deciding to create a warm look or a blue look or whatever. Start off with a neutral point and then add on the stilor. So we're going to use the autosetics for that. Then what we're going to do is we're going to bring down the saturation ever so slightly. See, saturation takes all of the colors in the image and simultaneously brings them down or intensifies them, whereas vibrance is going to look at the areas that are a little less saturated naturally and only lift those up. If I bring the saturation all the way down, everything turns black and white. But if I take the vibrance down all the way down, you can see that the reds are still in the frame. If I bring it up, You'll notice that it's only going to saturate. The reds are barely touched, but it's only going to saturate the yellows, the greens, and so on. That's because the reds in this frame were already naturally saturated. The vibrancy is only going to touch those areas that are not as saturated. What I like to do is first bring down the saturation. This is typically what I do in most of my photos and then bring up that vibrancy so that we can even out the saturation between the areas that are already saturated and the ones that are less so. The meet somewhere in the middle. It's like color balancing the image, the way that we color corrected the image. Then we can move over to the color mixer. In the color mixer, we have full control of each and every channel of color. If we pick the reds, we can move the reds and make them orange or we can move down and make them more toward the purple sides. We're not going to touch that because we want in food photography. We want everything to be the way it is naturally. We don't want to mess with the colors too much. You don't want to look at the lemon and see a green lemon, for instance, that doesn't make any sense. Here we can also individually control the saturation of all the colors. I'm actually going to make these reds pop a little more. We can also choose the reds to illuminate if we wanted to pop even more or darken them if we want that. But I want to go for the brighter look. I'm going to do a plus 16 on the reds. Then we move over to the oranges and same with the oranges. We can change up the hue if we want. To make it meet in the middle of the red so that the oranges meets the reds. We could do that by just a slight minus seven huge change. Then we can either saturate or desaturate the oranges. I'm going to bring them down ever so slightly, and we can choose if we want to eliminate this Maybe just a line. I'm going to bring it down then we have the yellows, which if we change is too much, now we see that the lemon actually looks like an orange and this way, it looks green. It doesn't make sense. I'm not going to touch the hues of the yellows, but let's see what I can do with the saturation. Maybe they're a bit too poppy. I'm going to bring them down ever so slightly at minus one, and then with the luminans we can either brighten or bring them down. I'm going to bring them down because that side of the frame is already bright enough. Then we move over to the greens. On the greens, I might increase the saturation ever so slightly. And I might illuminate ever so slightly as well. When it comes to the aquas, we don't really have a lot of aquas in the frame, so I can safely, I believe, desaturate the aquas entirely. Blues usually you have blues spilling from the windows, which is natural daylight. That could be a bit distracting unless you have blues in the image that you want to use. By removing the blues, as you can see, the blues are spilling on the right side of this corner here. See, We can remove those blues to create a more clean look. Sometimes creating a look is about removing colors as opposed to adding or saturating and so on. After that, we can move into the grading section if we want to create a style. Right now, we have a pretty natural style going on. I don't want to touch the shadows too much, but essentially, first we have the shadows and we can add a color to the shadows, if we want a particular look in the shadowy areas. I'll see if I'll do that, but I'm not going to touch it right now. Then we have the mid tones and highlights. If we want to go for the summary style, then we should probably move either the mid tones and highlights to the yellows and oranges or we just do the highlights or just do the mid tones. I like the idea that the highlights are going to be more yellow and orange because that suggests that there's some sunlight coming into the room. What I like to do is move the slider all the way up to 100%, and then I'll bring it down to maybe 1920, whatever the photo requires to just give it ever so slight sunny feel to it. And same with the metons, we can move the mitts and see if that sort of works in our favor, maybe. We'll see. I'll move this down ever so slightly to about the same levels. And see where we end up in. Now, if we look at before and after, with the grade, now we had a pretty white even image with a proper white balance shot, and now we're adding a style. Now we're making it warmer. If we really wanted to, then we could also play around with the shadows. But I would be careful with this because then we're really pushing the image to be a particular style. Typically speaking, if we're working with complimentary colors, you want to work on the opposite side of the color wheel. So now that we worked with oranges and yellows, If we want a complimentary color, we would move back to the blues or cyan or teal or something in that style, and then we can ever so slightly bring this down as well if we want to go for that. But I don't, to be honest, I'm just going to keep it at natural shadows with a bit of warmth. Now if I choose that I want an overall warmth in the image, then we can move the temperature slider ever so slightly up if we want an overall warmth to our image. Remember, we started like 5,600 keeling for the light, but we're going to move this a little bit lower, a little bit, let's see what works for us. I'm not going to go too much in the blue direction, but perhaps we're going to stop right here. Let's compare this to the auto settings. Yeah, I'm just going to warm it up ever so slightly, like so. Okay. Now we have a proper summary feel to this photo. Then if we want, we can use some of the features like blur, but this is a paved version of light mobile. I'm not really going to touch. There's nothing to blur because it's supposed to blur the background, and I'm not going to do that. But we can move into effects if we want to add grain and make it look like old film. We could do that there. We could vignette the image to really focus on the center part of the image, and that also darkens the corners around the bright areas, which helps us even that out. In detail, if there's need to do any kind of noise reduction, we can do that. In this case, we don't have to because we expose the image correctly. But if you do have noise as a result of using too high of an ISO in a dark setting, then you would use noise reduction to reduce that noise. In Optics, it's always a good idea to take both chromatic aberration and enable lens corrections. Because every time you photograph with any lens, it's going to distort the image. So you want to enable lens corrections for that, and chromatic aberration is just color spill that sort of happens in the contrast the areas of the photo. Typically, you don't see that unless you zoom in, and I'm not even sure if I had any chromatic aberration in this photo, but it's always a good idea to activate that regardless. And finally, we can move into the masking. And with masking, we have full control over the exact areas that we want to affect. So for instance, if I use a linear gradient, I can move it across these brighter areas, go into light, and then slightly bring down the highlights of that area. You see that? Because now we're evening out even more the right side versus the left side. We get a consistent look all throughout. Okay. And here's the before and here's the after with a style. That's the way that you can grade photos to make them look as natural as possible with just slight changes, adding a bit of warmth to really complement the colors of the food that we're photographing. Then what you can do after this is you can simply hit the three dots up there and create a preset. I'll just put them in the user presets group and just call it food warm as a preset. Because this means that now that we go back and we start looking at the other photos, now we can just apply the preset. After we do that, then we got to start making changes because now we applied all of the settings in one. Then we can rec this and just change this up for instance, straighten it up a little bit more How we can create a photo like so we can see that the light is a bit too strong, so we can just reduce the exposure, bring down the highlights even more. Then with the mask, we can also bring down the exposure on this side to make it all look even. See how quickly once you edit one photo and you have pretty much the exact same light setting is all across, you can just reapply the same preset. And make all of the photos have a consistent look. With that being said, now we're done with the home section, and remember, you can switch up those colors in the grading section exactly as you want. Play around with the colors a little bit, see what you like. But these are just the general adjustments that I would use when editing food photos. Now we're going to move over and start editing the restaurant photos. And after that, we're going to take a good look at the photos that we've done in the pro style and compare it to the Newbie style so that you can see when we apply the theory that we learned, why it's good to know these things and why shooting with intent always matters because no amount of editing is going to save a bad photo. We'll take a look at that in the very end. Stick around for that. All right. Let's move over and edit the restaurant photos. 19. Full Edit, Part II: Here we have the same thing going on. We first have to look at the way that we want to crop and straighten the photo, and we'll do that just like so to make sure that everything is sort of even, and we can see that the meat and the potatoes are placed exactly in the middle of that grid. Remember, the rule of thirds. That looks good, and then we're going to move this over just ever so slightly so the corners are even. We'll bring this down even more to make sure that there's an equal amount of space above and on the sides. There we go. And even though I could just technically apply the presets from the previous photo, I'm not going to do that. Instead, we're going to do this manually for the first photo and then apply the preset, the new preset to the other photos. Now, first and foremost, let's look at the balancing. With exposure, I'm pretty satisfied the way it is. I might bring down the highlights ever so slightly. Not the shadows, the highlights ever so slightly, and then I'll bring up the shadows. I'll bring down the whites a little bit because we do have a lot of bright areas as well, especially when you're photographing something that's white, then it's very easy to go overboard with the exposure. But now, let's start playing around with the exposure overall and see if we want to go for that bit of a brighter look right off the bat. Yes, I think I like that, and then add a bit of punch with the contrast slighter. I typically go plus ten, maximum plus 20. Some people that want to go for a really rough style are going to go up to plus 40 plus 50. I don't really do that. Now, let's go for the same faded look here. I like the fade like so and add a bit of a punch by bringing down those shadows. With the mid tones, we can bring them down because I think it's a bit too bright, same with the highlights, same with the whites. There we go. Here's the before. Here's the after. Ever so slight changes to just balance out the photo. Moving into the color, I'm going to use either as shot or auto. Let's see which one works better, as shot or auto. And if you really want to do an exact measurement that you can press this drop tool and select which white area should be white. That's what the drop tool is for. You want to highlight or bring it to a white area that's illuminated by the same light source and make that the target white color. Now we can see that the napkins are very, very white, whereas the plate is a little bit off white. So if we move this to the plate, we'll notice that it's going to attempt to make the plate white And now we have the white plate, but the napkins are turning a little bit magenta. You got to just pick your shot. If you want to do it here, if you want to do it here. I think I'm going to go for the plate and to combat this sort of magenta is feel to it, you can move the tint slider in the opposite direction. And you can see here we introduce greens. Here we introduce even more magentas. And we want to find a balance somewhere right in between. Maybe a plus zero actually. Now I'm going to do the same with the saturation. I'm going to bring it down because some colors naturally pop more, and I'm going to bring up the other colors by bringing up the vibrants. We're not going to touch blur, but we are going to go into the color mixer again and see if I can remove because there's some blue spill going on here from the daylight, and if I remove that, we're cleaning up the image. You see that cleaning it up. Same with the qua. I can remove them because I know there's nothing qua going on in the shot. And for the rest of them, I'm going to pretty much leave it as is. And now with the grating, we're going to move into the grating and going to start touching upon, let's see if we're going to use like any of the shadows, maybe we're going to go for that sort of bluish look. I'm not sure. I'm not a big fan of touching the shadows, but let's try for the sake of diversity to add a bit of blue to the shot and say saturation plus 20. With the midtones, maybe I won't touch them this time. Let's see if I'm just going to go for the warmer look in the highlights to suggest something warm, a warm source coming from the windows. I don't like this. I don't like the blues whatsoever. I'm just going to remove them. But we could go for a similar look that we had last time, like so and then bring down the midton saturation, so it's not too exaggerated, like so. This is if we are going for that same kind of look. Let's play around with something else. Let's try doing the shadowy areas a bit warm instead. That way, we're making the table look really warm. And if you really want to do everything in a warm setting, you could just go to the global color grading and then all of the things, shadows midtones and highlights are going to move toward the same direction. That's if you want to. But for the sake of diversity in this styling, I'll do it just for the sake of it. I'll go toward the blues in the shadow to make it kind of pop, and I'll then bring out the highlights and make them ever so slightly warmer. This is not typically the style that I would go for, but this is just to show you the power of color grading. Same with the mid tones, I'm going to bring them up, but like ever so slightly, like plus 13. So this is like another style you could go for to create this sort of teal and orangish kind of look. It's not really my thing. I wouldn't really do that. But it is possible. And with the temp slider now, we could move in a bluer direction or a warmer direction. I personally like to go say at plus four, a bit of a warmer feel, and then we can move into the effects. We can perhaps vignette this a little bit, so the corners are a bit darker. We could bring down the clarity to create a softer look in all of this and bring up the texture to really enhance the little bit of texture as you can see on the meat here. It's going to if I go all the way up, you can see that you can really taste the meat by looking at that or by bringing up the texture. Let's do a plus 20. Whereas clarity is the overall look. We can bring this down to make a dreamy look going on or we can go all the way up and create a really punchy dramatic look. I'm going to go for the softer one, but I'm combating that by increasing the texture. And with D haze, you're either adding haze or removing it and creating more contrast. If I remove haze, then you can see we're getting even more of a dreamy look and if I add haze, then we're creating a punchier look. And there you have it. If you look at the before and after, we've created at bluer style in this food photography. And what we can do then is we can save this as a preset, and call it food cold. And then when we go back, now we can just apply the preset to all of these. Okay. 20. Analyzing Before & After Photos: Okay. All right. Are you ready for the great revealed? See, this is the photo that we started out with when we got served food at the restaurant. So you get the food, it's placed in front of you and you just pull out your phone and you take a photo. And it looks like this. Okay. You know what I mean? So you look at the photo and you can see it's not even composed correctly. We got a little bit of the food in the down frame here. We got a random wine glass popping up with random napkins. We see the edge of the table, cutlery is there somewhere out of place. Nothing about this photo is appealing. It's just an information photo. You know, I got food. Look I'm in a restaurant. Like, it doesn't do anything. Looking at the next one, we see the same thing. It's terribly decomposed. We got all of these random things that I like to call fluff in the frame. Nothing is balanced. It looks terrible and compare it to what you can do with just a little bit of changes and shooting with intent. Then we turn out to do this. Okay. You know, incredible difference in what you can do and what you can achieve. Same thing with the home photos. This is even worse. We got the food. We got that sort of natural wood behind the food. The white balance is off. So the food looks not appealing at all. Like I wouldn't want to eat this. Look at that. It's all yellowy and orange and too saturated and just terrible. And this is not appealing whatsoever. But this is just the way that any when you're on Facebook or Instagram and somebody just snaps a random photo of their food. This is a lot of the times what it looks like, and it's terrible. And with a bit of control, with a bit of intent behind everything. We get photos that just look fantastic. They look properly like Instagram worthy, properly like gallery worthy for clients, for whatever you want to do if it's just for Instagram or professionally, but like this looks good. This looks incredible. So this is the difference between the way that a pro would take a photo versus the way a Newbie would You can really tell why that is. When you take a good look at the photo, you can tell from bad photos versus good photos. See, anybody could look at that and say, well, the other photos are better, most people would not be able to explain why. They might just look at the obvious and say it's too worried or it's too much this or too much of that. But you now with this knowledge of all the theory, could explain everything from a technical standpoint. The angle is off, the composition is off, the colors are off. There's too much fluff on the table. It's not crop properly. There's too many distractions. Like, you have so much lingo, so much rich lingo now that you can use to explain and to differentiate a good photo from a bad one. And what can you do with that? That means that when you take photos, you get to keep all of these things in your mind and you will now know and be more conscious about taking your food photos or any kind of photography, really. Because it's all going to apply all of the things like angles and composition, all of those things are going to apply no matter the type of photography that you do. But we're now using food photography as an example of that. But in general, this will make you a better photographer. So write all of that theory down and keep those things in mind, all of the points listed in the theory. And it even helps at start. It definitely helped me in the beginning to keep that in a piece of paper. So when I want to take a photo, I'm just like, Well, how do I turn this good? And I just look at the paper and I'm like, Oh, yeah, I could switch up the angle. I could compose this differently. I could remove some distracting things in the frame. I could, you know, all of these things are important in the decision making process of doing good photography. So theory first practice later. And with that being said, now we're going to hop into the next segment, which is right by the end now very close where you will be receiving your student assignments. So if you're excited for that, hop into the next chapter, and let's get started. 21. Your Assignment: Okay. All right, there's been a lot of information for you. I hope you haven't been information overloaded and feel like your brain is turning to mush. If you're not and if you're ready, we can start the assignment. What I would like you to do is take one photo of any food. It could be breakfast lunch or dinner, that you have cooked at home, and that you can demonstrate to me that with full control of everything at home, what does that photo turn out like? With editing as well. If you were to shoot for a client or whatever, show me the final photo of a home cooked meal. And the second assignment, the second photo would be going to a restaurant where you have absolutely no control over everything and you have to improvise a good shot and show me your improvisation skills where you can just control the small things that you can control like angles and composition and removing distractions from the frame and show me what that photo turns out as well with editing. And if you're not in a position to go to a restaurant and pay for food or whatever, then it's completely fine to just do it at home. In that case, take two sets of photos at home. Maybe it could be a breakfast and a dinner type of thing. Maybe it could be a lunch and breakfast, whatever you choose, but two sets of photos from your home cooked setting. And preferably, the second photo should be without any kind of added lights, only natural sources so that you have to force yourself to improvise that second shot. Either option works. I can't wait to see where you come up with. Good luck with your assignments and I will see you later on after you post them and I can give you some feedback if you ask for it. Okay. 22. You Are Ready!: Hello, friends. I hope that you've enjoyed this course. And if you're interested in keeping in touch with me, then please make sure to sign up to my newsletter. It's called R collective, and I share things like how to be a better photographer or filmmaker, how to be a creator in general, how you can monetize your art and start a business with photography of filmmaking. It's an interactive type of newsletter, which means that you're not just going to receive articles in the e mail, but you can also choose to click on the newsletter and go in there and like, share, comment, and directly have contact with me. So if you decide to sign up, I will see you in the next edition. Thank you for this time and good luck on your journey.