Transcripts
1. Free Lesson: Photographing Your Food: So now, we're going to take a photo just to get the bird's eye view, just to see if everything is feeling balance, or if there are any spaces we need to fill in. The first thing I usually do is clean off the lens on my phone because it tends to get dusty from being in my pocket or my purse. So, you want to clean that off, and tap to get the focus, and let's preview it. Everything's looking pretty good except for this tongue of fire bean, feels a little bit heavy on one side. So, I'm going to replace it with something a little bit lighter. When I'm doing that I want to keep in mind what else is surrounding it, because I don't want too many elements that are the same being close together. So, I think I'll use a sprig of rosemary and maybe some porcelain to balance that out and give it a nicer border rather than have something be heavy on one side. Here, I think I want to fill in a little bit more. All right. Now that we've rearranged a little bit and filled in a few blank spots, we'll take another photo to see how everything's looking. So, same thing. You want to hold your camera steady and tap to focus. Rather than having my arms just out where I have less control and it's less steady, I like to T-Rex my arms and just tuck my elbow into my side so I have another point to keep the camera steady. Keep in mind, we're going to be cropping for a square format for Instagram, so keep that in mind as you're previewing as well. Okay. So, everything is looking good and complete. I like it, so I'm going to stop at this point and edit my photo from here before I upload it to Instagram.
2. Introduction: My name is Julie Lee, and I run Julie's Kitchen. Food has always been a really important part of my life. My parents are both immigrants, so food was always a way for them to communicate our cultural past to us, and also I grew up in a really agricultural part of California, where we're always surrounded by farms and farmer's markets. So, eating really fresh food that was local and seasonal has always been really important to me. When I moved to LA, my world really opened up because just the variety of food available to you was really really amazing, and also when I studied abroad in France, my food world just changed because there were all these cheeses and wines and sausages that we didn't have access to, and it made me really think what what else is there out there that I don't know about that is delicious. From there, I started Julie's Kitchen food blog as a way to challenge myself to find new foods to try and to share because I feel like if this is something I'm discovering for the first time, there may be somebody out there who has never seen bitter melon or never never liked it, and if I can present it in a way that is delicious or beautiful, they might reconsider. So, part of my food collages are to share what's local, what's seasonal. Also, new discoveries, new culinary things to eat, smell, and taste, and I feel like it can appeal to all your senses. In 2007, I started my blog Julie's Kitchen as a way to share recipes and sharing your discoveries, and I was working in kitchens at the time. So, I was understanding food in a different way, and my perspective of food was changing. So, as a photographer, and being a really visual person, Instagram has always been a really natural way for me to share food instantaneously, and my food collages started out, I will just come home from the farmer's market, and show everybody what I bought for the week. I thought to myself, well, this is great and I love sharing what I'm eating for the week and what's local and seasonal in LA, but I don't feel like I'm doing these fruits and vegetables justice because they're beautiful, their outsides are great, but sometimes you have a piece of dragon fruit and the inside is really what's stunning. So, I want to show the inside of the fruit or vegetable, the outside, and show things that maybe were surprising or really really beautiful, and have people think about food as an art form. So, today we're going to go through the process of making a Julie's Kitchen food collage. So, today, this morning we went shopping at the farmer's market, and afterwards we walked around the neighborhood and forged and picked up little bits of herbs and flowers and leaves, and I'll show you how to build a collage from start to finish while keeping your vegetables really vibrant and fresh and delicious looking. We're going to do this in an all natural way. So, there's no funny food styling tricks. We're not going to put lipstick on any tomatoes, or anything. This is all natural, and at the end you can still eat it.
3. Visiting the Farmer's Market: We're at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, and we're going to do a quick walk-through, seeing what's new at the market or what's in season. It's September, so it's just the end of Stanford season. There's still going to be peaches and they're still going to be tons of tomatoes, but you're going to start seeing things like squash and more of the Fall root vegetable coming in. So, let's do our walk through. These tongue of fire beans are really really pretty, they're pink on the outside and on the inside, you opened them up, some of the are, well, these ones are green. But some of them have a nice really pink, like hot fuchsia color which could be really pretty to shoot. So, let's get some of these. All right. So, we got some really beautiful tongue fire shelling beans, and next we're going to go to the honey vendor. So, I've been out of honey recently and Bill is one of the best honey vendors at the market. He recommended this sage wildflower one because it's the hardest or most rare one to harvest for him. So, I know how much work that goes into producing something like this. So, this one is really special and has a really distinct taste to it and it will pair really well with cheeses. So, I definitely have my favorite farmers for different things and different farmers who grow different produce well. You get to know that by shopping at the market a lot and talking to the farmers to see what they have going on. This farmer I really loved their kale, they do a really good job today. It's always really fresh and delicious, very sweet. We got all these really beautiful flowering herb, it's really an interesting things that are also edible. So, we'll be able to make some really beautiful food and collages. I'm going to pick up some of this beautiful little gem lettuce. I'm going to show you how to how to make it look really fresh in the collages and keep it looking really crisp. The melons are really still in season right now. We're in Los Angeles, so the season tend to last a long time because of our really temperate weather. This is one of my favorite things of all time, it's lemon verbena and it smells really, really good. It's great in lemonade and iced tea, but it's also really beautiful to photograph. So, this is one of my favorite farms for tomatoes. They always have really, really, really sweet, delicious varieties. They're telling me because of the heat this year, the tomato season is ending a little sooner because the plants are getting a little bit too much sun and too much heat. So, the plants are just dropping their fruit. So, we're going to stock up on these and maybe preserve them or canned them so we can make tomato season last longer for us. Ginger is one of my favorite things to buy and I love finding it with the whole plant on it. Because it's really young and less fibrous and you're able to, I like to pickle them and they're much more tender. So, whenever I find them like this when they're still young, I like to buy them and you never see them, look how different it looks than it does at the store. It looks nothing like that. Like it's still really yellow and still even has this reddish pink part of the plants to it. So, this is Coleman Farms and they always have really really interesting things they grow a lot for a lot of the restaurants in the area and some of the best restaurants. So, I picked up some huraian shiso which is similar to perilla and it's really interesting because it's purple, it has this beautiful purple color on one side and the other side is green. So, it's really interesting and it's starting to flower already. So, you have these really interesting bits and you can see towards the end of its life it's starts to seed, and this will eventually become seeds for the next harvest. Then, I also picked up some persian mint which is had these, it's also starting to flower and has these really beautiful purple, kind of lilac to it which will, I think they'll pair really well with the other flowers we picked up today. The last thing I got from them was this cute little pineapple guava. It's like a sweetart. The outside of the skin is green and might really tart and the inside is premium, really sweet. So, it'll be nice to show the inside and the outside when we collage later. I needed to show the two different sides or something surprising, like these leaves how it has two sides to it and the flowers, all in one plant. So, this is everything we bought today at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. As you can see, it's one of my favorite markets just because of the sheer variety of things you can find, a new really the interesting thing. Without even trying, we have basically a rainbow produce going from reds and oranges, yellows, lots of greens, of course, and then a lot of really beautiful purple. So, we found these really beautiful watermelon gherkins or mouse melons. They taste like, one many cucumbers, but I think they're really delicious, and they're really interesting, and it's something that might not grow all over the world. So, I always like to share things that have a really interesting pattern to them or texture or something new to make it special. I also found these Indian bitter melon. I loved bitter melon and I grew up eating it, but the ones that I grew up eating had more of a round texture to them and these have much more of a spiked to them, which I think will be really interesting. I found this really beautiful wild lilac today and it has these really gorgeous flowers. They told me that chefs are buying these to use in their alcohol like cocktail drink. They're garnishing with these and using the stems as stir sticks, which I thought was really interesting and neat, that you can take something that might not be used in a culinary way and turn it into something that can be. So, definitely I want to highlight that and share that with everyone in my collages. It's got a really sweet smell to it. We have this lovely purple carrot called Twilight carrot. They have this natural beautiful gradient where they run from really deep pretty purple, violet to white at the end, which I'll definitely want to highlight. I also picked up some radishes which I'm going to show you guys how to, right now they look dirty and not as fresh, but I'm going to show you guys how to make it really pop and make the colors really vibrant for your photo. Same thing goes for the little gem lattices. Right now, it looks dirty inside, and even though it's fresh in the market, it's still kind of dirty and there might be bugs in it. So, I'm going to show you how to prep it so that it looks really fresh and delicious and like something you'd want to eat. All right. Now, that we've finished buying all our produced for the week, we're going to go back to the studio and photograph it.
4. Preparing the Produce: So, we're home from the market now, and the first thing we want to do is prep our fruits and veggies, and get them ready for their collage. With herbs or anything like that, you want to treat them like you would flowers. So, you want to cut the stems off on the bottom, so they'll be able to drink more water, and then submerge the stems in about an inch or two of water, treat them just like you would flowers. This is a great way to store them too, not just for collaging, but also for everyday herb storage. Then with your root vegetables and your greens, you just want to submerge them in some really ice cold water, that way the radishes and everything will be really crisp and the reds and the purples will be really vibrant. For your greens, like for our lattices, you want to take each leaf off, so that each leaf will be able to drink up the ice water and become really crisp. Then for your root vegetables like carrots and your radishes, you're going to want to remove the tops, you can feed this to the compost pile or whatever you want to do. The same thing goes for the radishes, you want to remove these top as well. The water's going to keep everything from looking really dry as it would if it was just sitting out, it would start wilting, so this is a way to keep everything looking really fresh, and crisp, and delicious and make people want to eat it, and we'll just add some ice cubes to the water. So, now we have all our herbs in water and our greens, and our root vegetables are all soaking. Things like berries and cucumbers and squash, you just want to give them maybe a light rinse and a scrub, but nothing major. Okay. Now that all our fruits and veggies are washed and prepped and ready to go, I'm going to show you a few of my favorite tools to food collage with, and many of those involve really sharp instruments. One of the most versatile is just a really sharp paring knife, this is a shine one, it's really great. A chef's knife would work as well as long as it's really sharp, you want to make sure you're able to get those really clean edges without smooshing the vegetable. The other thing I like to use are kitchen shears. These are really great for just snipping the leaves off herbs, off the stems, and I use those a tone. One of my favorite tools is a mandolin, this thing gives you really really uniform pieces, and works best with really firm things like zucchini or cucumbers, and you'll just get perfectly uniform pieces that work really well in a collage. When I'm wanting a really really sharp edge, I use my X-Acto knives, this is great for things like opening passion fruit. One other thing I like to have is a brush. As I'm collaging, if certain things are starting to dry out, I will just get a little rami can of water and kind of brush it with water so that it has that nice sheen to it, and looks alive again. I always do like to have my chef's knife, this is just a regular eight inch chef's knife, I always like to have that handy, it works for larger pieces like if I'm trying to get through a tough skin squash, and it works for little things too. Just remember to keep it really really sharp, and to hone it before you use it every time. I also like to have a utility knife on hand, it gets the smaller jobs done. Then the last thing I'd like to work with, what I'm getting really really intricate are my pliers, that allows me to kind of place things precisely. So, just like if you're building a house, you want to start with a really strong foundation, and then work your way up from there, the same thing goes for food collaging, you want to start out with the larger elements to anchor your collage down. So, in today's collage, the bitter melon is one of the larger pieces, and so we'll kind of base our collage around that, and when we lay it out we want to keep in mind the rule of thirds and also triangle composition, so that we have a nice anchor to hold down our piece. So, for this collage in particular, today the colors that jumped out at me were the greens, and the texture of this bitter melon was just one of the most stunning things I saw today, I really want to highlight that. Then I saw a lot of the lilac, purples, and violets in the flowers, and then the Korean Chisso, and the berries here which are really pretty purple and blue. So, we're just going to start with the bigger pieces, and work our way down to the small little herbs and everything. When you're thinking about composition, it really depends on what you're finding at the market. If you're finding a giant pumpkin and that's what you want to highlight, then do that and base your whole closure on that. You can have a focal point or you can make it more of a pattern, but for today since it's really about the colors and textures, I really want to showcase that instead of just one individual item. Another great thing when you're working with round objects is that well they tend to roll. So, when you're making a collage, you don't want things to roll around, you want them to stay where you place them. So, for something like that, I will cut the end off, say for example, I want to highlight the middle of this line, and now I have a flat surface like this to place, and it won't roll around, and it will stay exactly where I wanted to. So, I also found these really pretty tongue of fire beans, and I do want to showcase the outside because it has this really pretty pink and green speckle to it, but also I want to show what's inside. These tongue of fire beans are speckled on the inside and the outside, some of them, some of them are more ivory depending on where they are in their lifecycle. So, sometimes you get these really beautiful speckled ones for the ones that are later on in their growth cycle. So, similar to cooking, you want to have everything ready to go before you start collaging kind of like plastic like you would for cooking, just having everything ready to go, so that there's nothing waiting and wilting on your table. So, we're going to slice up our heirloom Italian zucchini on the mandolin like so, and for my bitter melon, I'm going to just cut it in half lengthwise. With the lime, since I cut this one in half this way, I might cut this one the other way just to get a little bit of variety, and I might show the outside for this. These are the pineapple guava, I really want to showcase the green because I feel like that looks really vibrant and really pretty. If you were to be collaging apples or pears or something that oxidizes easily, you would put it in a bowl of water with lemon juice in it and that would keep it from turning brown. Since we cut the other two bitter melon lengthwise, for this one, I might cut it in half the other way just to get a little bit of variety in the collage, and show the cross-section, see it just looks like a little spiky sea creature. For this been, you see for one variety of bean, you have white ones, you have speckled ones, and these ones are green, and this is from the same bag of beans that we bought. So, I really like to show that variety in how one thing can look so different. Even though they're both purpled potatoes, they look quite different in the middle. The purple Peruvian potato has much more white through it and white veiling, whereas the other one has more purple concentrated in the middle with a white border. So, I think it'll be nice to show both varieties in our collage today. Next step, we have our perslain, and this is something you would want to use your kitchen shears for or your paring knife because you'll probably just want to show some of the leaves for that, for the bigger stems, and then for the smaller stems, you might want to show the leaf and the stem. Next, we have our purple carrots, these I might just leave whole actually, they're pretty small, and I could cut them in half to show the inside as well. Yeah. Sometimes you're not sure what they'll look like inside because there are so many different varieties, but this one's really beautiful, it has the white veining through it, just like the potato, so I think those will complement each other really well, so I will show the middle for some of them, and leave some of them whole. For variety, I think I'll cut some of them in half this way, and it's always nice to have a little trash bowl next to you, so you can keep your work area really clean. So, now we're going to prep some of our herbs, and you just want to take the whole stem out of the water, and this would be a good time to use your kitchen shears again. I try to pick some of the leaves that are larger, some of the leaves that are smaller, so you can get a nice variety in your collage, and this one's great because it's starting to flower, and so, besides just the bigger and smaller leaves, you can show the flowering element, and you can pull some of them off the stem, and leave some of them on there whole. For the Perslain, I'm just going to snip off some of the flowers. We'll just snip a few leaves of the lemon verbena off, and we also have some regular mint. Then some of them I'll just leave on the stem like this because I think it's it's really cute. This is the rosemary that I foraged, so I don't want the raspberry to overwhelm the collage, so maybe I'll just pluck off like from this spring maybe the top third or so, and it'll have its little flowers on it, and then some of them maybe I'll just take the flower off and add that. So, things like the lettuce are the quickest to wealth, so you want to prep those just before you're going to put them down on the collage. Like for these pieces, we pulled them out of the ice water, and just blotted them on paper towels, but you want to wait until you're ready to collage them. So, that's one thing you might not have ready to go. So, we'll put this back in the water.
5. Setting the Stage: Okay. So, now we're going to start our collage and we're going to start with the bigger pieces to kind of build a nice foundation for the collage and have pieces to anchor it down. So, this is our workspace here. We're working on a white background, but, of course, you can use anything you'd like. I just prefer to use white because I think it gives it a nice canvas and gives the colors a chance to pop, but anything like a blank marble, or wood grain, or anything without too much distraction would work great for a collage. Let's begin with our bigger elements. For this piece, in particular, it'll be our bitter melon. So, keeping in mind these dimensions, we're going to want to start in the middle and kind of build outward because you don't want big pieces hanging on the edge and then your piece is going to feel a little lopsided. So, you want to keep in mind your composition, your rule of thirds when you're shooting photography in general, and when your collaging. That will really keep the rhythm of the piece flowing and nothing feeling out of balance. Anyway, just have fun with it because it's food, and you're playing with food, and if you don't like how something looks, you can just move it. Like for here, I put this here, but I realize I have another stem piece with a stem, so I might put that on this side and instead of that side to balance out the stem piece. From there, I'm going to work with my zucchini rounds because those are kind of larger pieces as well. One way to get a really good balance on your collage is to not stay in one place at the table or wherever you're working from, kind of work from one side, but then switched to another, and then switch to the other side so you can get a really balanced piece and you can get- and even though we've cut half of the zucchini, we don't have to use the whole thing. You can just save this to eat it later. Nothing's going to go to waste so don't worry about that. Next, I'm going to put down some of our tongue of fire beans. For this piece, in particular, one side is really bright fuchsia and the other side is more muted, so for that, I want to highlight this really beautiful fuchsia color, so I would put that down instead of the other side. These are a little bit dry so this is maybe an element I would want to just hit with a few drops of water and so when you shoot it, the camera will catch the little drops of water and kind of make it pop a little bit more. Next, we're going to put down our purple potatoes and these are starch. So, this is another element we would maybe want to hit with a little few drops of water before we shoot it too because the starch in it tends to dry it out a little bit. Next, we'll put down our limes, and I'm going to showcase the inside of the lime, and also the critique vibrant green skin since we're working with greens and purples I want to show all different turns of greens and purples. Next, we're going to put down some of our purple chisso. So, one side is purple and the other side is green. So, I think I'll put down a few different pieces a few different ways so you can see both sides. Next, I'm going to put down some of our carrots. I'm going to showcase the inside since it has that beautiful white vein running through it. I'm going to put down some more of the bitter melon but the cross-section. Then you'll be able to see some of the seeds too which I think are a really interesting texture. Now that most of my larger elements are in place, I can start filling it in with maybe some of the flowers, or smaller elements like the blueberries, but from here maybe I'll take a picture so I can get an Instagram photo that goes from a more sparse collage to a more dense collage. This needs to get a little variety in the placement. If you put down one mint leaf going one way, maybe the next mint leaf you put down will go the other way, so you get lots of nice movement and variety in your collage. Just to check my composition, when I feel like I'm getting close to completing the collage, I'll take a few photos and to kind of preview the image on my phone before I Instagram it, to see if there's any missing spaces that I'm not seeing from this angle because the bird's eye view angle is very different than from what you're seeing from this angle. So, you want to make sure you walk around the table and look at it from every side to see if it looks balanced on every side from left, right, up, down, everywhere.
6. Shooting: So, now we're going to take a photo, just to get the bird's eye view and see if everything is feeling balance or if there are any spaces needed to fill in. The first thing I usually do is clean off the lens on my phone because it tends to get dusty from being in my pocket or my purse. So, you want to clean that off and tap to get the focus. Let's preview it, then everything's looking pretty good except for this tiny fire bean, feels a little bit heavy on one side. So, I'm going to replace it with something a little bit lighter. When I'm doing that, I want to keep in mind what else is surrounding it. Because I don't want too many elements that are the same being close together. So, I think I'll use a sprig of Rosemary and maybe some persley to balance that out and give it a nicer border rather than have something be heavy on one side. Here, I think I want to fill in a little bit more. All right. Now that we've rearranged a little bit and filled in a few blank spots, we'll take another photo to see how everything's looking. So same thing, you want to hold your camera steady and tap to focus rather than having my arms just out where I have less control and it's less steady like to T-rex my arms and just tuck my elbow into my side. So, I have another point to keep the camera steady. Keep in mind, we're going to be cropping for a square format for Instagram. So, keep that in mind as you're previewing as well. Okay. So, everything is looking good and complete. I like it. So, I'm going to stop at this point and edit my photo from here before I upload it to Instagram.
7. Editing in Afterlight: Before we start editing, I just want to talk about the importance of setting up or not needing to edit actually and shooting with really good light or as much as possible, because you really want to do the least amount of editing possible. It's great that these phones have the capability to edit and to sharpen and brighten, but in an ideal situation you don't want to have to edit it all. But, in certain cases, you won't be able to control that. For that, I'm going to show you some of my favorite apps to edit photos with, okay? So, the first app we'll start with is AfterLight. So, since we're editing for Instagram, we're going to crop in a square format, play with your cropping to see if you want it to bleed off the edges or not. All right. That looks good. All right? So, now that we've cropped, we're going to, this picture came out a little bit dark, so, we're going to do some really basic things like brighten and adjust the contrast and maybe some of the saturation and the sharpening, but we really want to keep it pretty minimal and if you just tap on the screen, you can see where we started from and where we are now. So, you can gauge how much you want to adjust. I'm just going to bump up the saturation a little bit, just so you can see a little bit more of the pinks from the beans. Since it came out a little bit darker and our exposure was off a little bit, I'm just going to bump that up a little bit. Then you can see it just lightens it up a little bit. I just like to, for this collage in particular, I do want to sharpen it a little bit to show off the texture of the bitter melon and some of the beans. So, you can see that little detail. So, this is what we started from and this is what we're at now. I think it's looking a lot improved, so the last thing would be to put a filter on it if you want. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, it just depends on the collage, okay? Then from there, you just want to save it to your camera roll. So, once we have our our edited version of our collage in Instagram, I'd like to do a brief description of what the collage is and what we're highlighting. So, in this case, I might talk about the bitter melon and list off some of the really interesting ingredients I found this week and then I will hashtag it Julie's Kitchen food collage.
8. Editing in VSCO: The other app that I like to use for editing my iPhone photos is VSCO Cam. Okay, and when I start my editing process, each photo is going to be a little bit different, what you want to stand out. Are you going for more of a moody shot or are you going for a bright poppy shot? That would determine which filter you choose and how you edit. So, I'll just be going through some basic editing tips with brightness and contrast so you can see a good place to start from. Since this is editing for Instagram, we'll be cropping for a square format here. You can kind of play with the crop and see. Do you want the edges to bleed or do you want it to be clean? I think I want to crop it a little bit more just so it bleeds off that edge. Okay, the first thing you want to adjust is your white balance if it's feeling too warm or too cool. For this one, maybe we can pump up the warmth a little bit before we adjust our brightness and our contrast. That's a little bit too warm. So, you can just kind of play with it. There's no set formula for editing your photos because each photo is going to be different depending on what time of day you're shooting or where you're shooting, what elements you're shooting. So for this, I played with it and I pumped up the temperature and I pumped down the temperature and it seemed like it was just fine where it was that. So, we'll leave it there and since it was a little bit dark, we will pump up the exposure. If you just hold down the photo, you can see the before and after. There, I'll play with the contrast. Sometimes, I can get your photo just to look a little bit sharper in addition to the sharpening tool. You can play with the saturation as well. That's one of those things if you want the pinks to really pop or the purple, sometimes playing with the saturation helps those colors to really pop. Let's just throw a filter on it for fun. I don't always put a filter on my photos but it just depends on the mood or what elements I'm trying to highlight. If it's a really poppy cherry tomato picture, maybe I'll just put a little bright filter on it so that the colors can pop. But in this one, it's more about the textures and everything so I want to make sure that you're able to see the bitter melon skin and the other cute little fern leaves. Okay, from there, just save that photo to your camera roll. Switch over to Instagram, and you can kind of compare and contrast how we edited in Afterlight and how we edited using VSCO. So, two very different edits. So, this one is a much cooler looking one temperature-wise, and this one's a little bit warmer. So, you can kind of gauge which one you like better. From there, you can further edit in Instagram if you want to make any last minute edits. You might brighten it a little bit more just so it pops. Okay? Then from there, in my caption, I want to describe what's going on or I want to highlight a few of the elements. In this case, it'd be the bitter melon and maybe the purple shiso and the mouse melons, a few of the elements that you can actually see in the collage that I'm excited about that I want to share, and then I will hashtag it Julia's Kitchen Food Collage so I can see the whole collection of them together. Thanks so much for taking my class. I look forward to seeing what you guys create. Be sure to tag Julia's Kitchen so I can follow along. See you on Instagram.
Julie Lee, Founder, Julie's Kitchen
