Photo Styling

Light it Up

Whether you’re selling wooden bowls, illustrated posters, kids toys, or clothing - natural light will go a long way toward making your products look their best. Artificial light can taint your pictures and cause color contamination that actually makes your image less appealing. Save yourself the time and effort of having to heavily retouch images to restore their true-to-life beauty.

Beautiful, natural lighting makes these products look heavenly.

Back it Up

Once you’ve found the best light to shine on your item, consider what’s behind it as well. It’s easy to get in a background rut. Try experimenting with various materials like wood, marble, and cloth to create different moods in your images. As long as the background doesn’t compete with your product, it can be an invaluable addition that helps your photo tell a story.

A blue backdrop makes these rainbow
cupcake toppers appear to float in the sky.

Prop it Up

A great product is key to having a successful shop, but on its own, it can make for a lonely subject. Consider including supporting items to your images that help tell a story about your product. Choosing the right props in the right amounts can be tricky, but once you’ve fine-tuned what works for your shop, you’re on your way to truly dynamic photo compositions.

Fun props, like the custom confetti with this flatware

Hopefully these basic tips make the hurdle of styling your images a little easier to overcome. 

Food Photography Lighting & Styling

In today’s foodie/cellphoneography/Instagram world, everyone is a food photographer. It’s almost customary to take a photo of your food before digging in. Some restaurants have even had to instate a “no photography” policy because patrons complain about the constant flash of cameras.

Food photography, however, plays a huge role across many different businesses. Previously limited to the food industry (restaurants, markets, specialty food stores) and food-dedicated publications, food photography now spans a wide breath of editorial publications and commercial/advertising campaigns. 

Bottom line? No matter what kind of photographer you call yourself, it’s advantageous to have some food photography skills under your belt. You’ll also want to stand out from the crowd of amateur food photographers – showing clients that you have the experience and know-how to deliver the best images.

If you’re relatively new to the world of food photography, or just looking to brush up on your skills, start with lighting technique – specifically natural light. Like all photography, mastering lighting will ultimately take your creativity up a notch.

1. Always keep white and silver bounce cards in your lighting kit

One essential piece of equipment in your lighting kit should be white and silver bounce cards, used to gently fill in any harsh shadows caused by window light. Ricky Rhodes advises photographers to use these cards to bring details back into the deep shadows, ultimately adding more color and texture to your images. The bounce cards are also important because you should rarely be shooting into direct sunlight. You want to avoid too much contrast so that food looks soft and elegant. You can also use the bounce cards to direct more light onto the image to highlight certain features and make your photos “pop”  

2. Bring your focal point forward

The focal point of any great food image is the dish itself. Props and garnishes can help tell the food’s story, but they should never distract from the main event. Ricky Rhodes suggests focusing near the front edge of the food. This naturally draws the viewer in to the rest of the frame. You also typically want to shoot with the aperture wide open to deliver shallow depth of field and isolate the food in your frame.

3. When in doubt, shoot overhead

Many amateur photographers fall into the trap of shooting food from an angle that makes it look like it’s about to slide off the plate (like this shot). Shooting overhead not only eliminates that possibility, but it also gives you more flexibility to add props to the frame.

4. Mimic natural light

Not every day will be sunny – you know that, and your client knows that, but that can’t stop the shoot. Mimicking natural light is an art form in itself, and you’ll need a few extra lighting tools. If possible bring portable lighting kit with a large softbox, which acts as a big portable window when shooting on a cloudy day.

To help give your food photography a fresh and natural perspective, try shoot directly into the light. Then the dish appears in front of a completely blow out background with lovely rim light. This technique works well with translucent foods like lettuce leaves and drinks. The result is a night highlight that outlines dishes and makes your images more vibrant.

6. Compliment food with props of similar colors and interesting textures

Food photography is often about telling a story. Who made this? What’s the occasion? What season it is? The right props can help you share this story – just beware of going overboard.

Try picking one standout color from the dish – say the strawberries in a strawberry rhubarb pie – and adding a small element that incorporates that color. It could be the paper that your dish sits on, dusted powdered sugar on the table, orange slices, a wooden cutting board, or a cup of coffee.

7. Make minimal adjustments in post to remove distractions

Much like photojournalists, professional food photographers prize themselves on little-to-no post-production. That being said, if a few crumbs or blemishes on the surface material are distracting, by all means remove them in Photoshop. You can also make some minimal adjustments to levels and curves, and color balance in Lightroom to get the exposure where you want it.

Scrapbooking

A few posts ago we gave you some scrapbooking FREEBIES but then we thought... do you even scrapbook? 

If not, you should be! Its a fun creative way to store your photo's instead of in the old dusty box or falling apart album... so here is our SCRAPBOOKING 101 for beginners:

You have decided to make a scrapbook page, that’s the first step. Learn how to create your first page with the following basic scrapbooking supplies. Create a shopping list and budget before you begin to help stay on track with the supplies you need.

Sort and Organize Photos

Organise your photos into groups of themes, such as wedding, birthday, anniversary, and so on. Keep sorting down into groups until you are happy with your final selections. This will allow you to easily choose a theme for your first page.

Choose Cardstock, Patterned Paper and Album Size

Standard scrapbooking sizes are 12″x12″ and 8 1/2″ x 11″. These are the most popular and readily available sizes for albums and papers. Cardstock is a sturdy, heavyweight paper that provides a good base page for a layout. It is available in a variety of different weights, sizes and colors. Patterned paper is generally thinner and is available in many patterns and colors to complement your layout.

Select Your Cutting Tools

You will need a way to trim down photos and paper for your projects. A good pair of scissors is a must, but if you want to have straight cuts, a paper trimmer is a good investment.

Choose an Adhesive

A glue stick is usually the most basic and inexpensive to start out with. Choose an acid free adhesive that works well with your cardstock and photos. Products include double sided tape, foam tape, and photo tabs.

Journaling and Embellishments

If you plan on handwriting your titles and captions, photo safe pens are specially created for scrapbooking projects. Look for pens that are acid-free and permanent. Embellishments are not a necessity, but they are nice to have if you want to add a few extra touches to your pages. Items include stickers, pre-made cut outs, ribbons, buttons, eyelets, and tags.

Put it all Together!

It is best to layout all photos and embellishments on your base page before you begin cutting and pasting. You can play with many different layouts and ideas on the page to see which one works best with your photos. Color plays a huge role in the overall look of your page. It is best to choose between two to four colors that will work well with your layout. Once you have decided on a final look, you can begin gluing your photos and other embellishments to the scrapbook page.

That’s it! You have created your first page.

Just remember, not EVERY SINGLE page has to be a work of art and stickers and buttons. keep every other page simple and it will make your scrap book all that much more beautiful and effective!

Happy Scrapbooking!!!

Spring... It's coming!

Can you believe its Spring next month here in Sunny S.A (not that we have had much of a winter) time to start you spring cleaning and adding those "spring" looks to your home, office and your blog! We plan to have a Spring Fancy Photobooth Special, just in time for all the Spring weddings, birthdays and babies!

If you have a pinboard / dream board / motivation board (whatever you call yours) here's a fun way to "Spring" it up! 

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1. Small fake flowers

2. drawing pins

3. Glue gun OR wood glue works too!

WHAT TO DO:

Put glue on the top (flat) part of the drawing pin, leave for 1 minute and then stick on the flower, wait until completely dry and you are ready to go!

We love pinning up our favourite Spring Shoot Photo's up with these! 

Scrapbooking Printables!

We love scrapbooking... and we love free stuff even more. It makes our hearts skip a beat when we see "SCRAPBOOKING PRINTABLES FREE"

So, we thought we would share with you... Just because we love you!

We have a new Header!

As I'm sure you have noticed, we have a new banner!

Out with the old and in with the new!

We just feel that this banner represents us a LOT better! So here's to new beginnings, new business and  new customers!

We cant wait to do your next function! Birthday, Corporate function, Weddings - YOU NAME IT!

Give us a mail on:

kayleigh_zettler@hotmail.com  

OR

tlzettler@telkomsa.net

Our 5 best tips for AWESOME indoor photo's...

5 Tips for AWESOME indoor Photo's

1. Adjust your white balance

If we could tell everyone just one thing about indoor photography, this would be it. White balance. It will change your life (it totally changed ours). We lived through months of orange basement photos and random blue photos thanks to "auto white balance," and we're here to tell you there's a cure! Little did we know it would be so easy. To simplify WB, just know that it is the coloring of the light. Different light sources come with different colors or temperatures. Our eyes are awesome and can adjust to the different hue of light each light source provides, but digital cameras can't do that on their own. You want to adjust white balance to get the colors in your images as accurate as possible. For example, the coloring of shade is much cooler than sunlight, but light bulbs inside the house are much warmer than sunlight. Because of the change of coloring, you need to adjust your WB to compensate. Auto white balance (AWB) does an okay job, especially outside with the sun, where your camera can guess coloring pretty well. But low light and mixed indoor lighting throws it off, and you may have found you'd like a little more (or a LOT more) control to avoid those bluish or orangey-reddish pics you're getting (like what we got for months!!).  Adjusting your own WB will make the most obvious difference indoors at night, but it's always better than auto. There are almost always presets on a DSLR, which are displayed as icons you can choose from to match your lighting:

For clarification, Tungsten is your basic yellowish household light bulb. Fluorescent lights make you feel like you're walking through Target (think bright neon-like white). Everything else is pretty self explanatory. So for cooler light (cloudy day, shade, indoors in the day without lights on) you’ll tell the camera to warm things up, and in warm light (indoor lights/tungsten) you’ll tell it to cool down. Or just pick the WB icon that matches your light :)

2. Lose the flash

We have to confess..., we LOVE our flash... perhaps a little too much. Even with our point and shoot. Granted we've probably ruined a lot of shots that way, and when we finally had to suck it up and learn how to use our external flashes for receptions, we hit a learning curve the size of China. And we'll admit, there is a time and a place for flash. Large events in the dark being a good example. But (we could totally be going out on a social limb here) we are believers that inside our house we can all take great photos without it. We can also take a lot of not-so-great photos without it, but that's what the delete button is for :) And our guess is that even then, you will not regret having ditched your flash. Our goal with photos is to make them authentic, and flash will sadly take your moment and flatten all the depth right out of it. It removes soft shadows that show definition and replaces it with harsh shadows that are super distracting. Work with the real light you have and learn everything you can about your camera so you can adjust it to make your shot light enough without flash.

3. Use your biggest aperture

Another confession (all the sudden it feels like we have a lot of things to confess)... We are addicted to large apertures. Huge, open, suck-in-every-speck-of-light apertures. A depth of field that turns everything into a watery blur (except the tiny point I focused on) makes us melt. This is to a fault, and we stick to it even in family sessions or group shots. We seriously can't help ourselves. Aperture. This is hard for us to even mention without going into more detail, but for now, know that your aperture is the size of the opening on your lens. The bigger the opening of your lens, the more light you will let in, and the more background you will blur out. Both of these things are the best news ever for indoor shots. You need light, and you want the busy background to melt away. Try switching to Aperture Priority setting ("Av" for Canon and "A" for Nikon) and get your aperture to the smallest number possible (they're fractions, the smaller the number, the larger the opening). That's a good start.

4. Clean up the clutter

As a family, we've always got some form of a tornado running through our house, so a constant mess is inevitable. But we have a little secret. We like to practice the idea of quickly cleaning up the background of any shot before we take it. This doesn't mean sweeping and vacuuming or putting everything away on their proper shelf. We would miss the moment we wanted to capture if we did that. Let's call it the 10 Second Sweep. We do a quick scan of the scene, and if anything is distracting from what we want our focus to be on, we just move it away so that it's out of the shot. Literally, like to the side of the couch. Or to the opposite wall. It's fake cleaning. And it works like a charm. We do it all the time :) We're all about being real, but if we're taking a photo that we may potentially frame on my wall, or send off to grandparents, or if we just want to make ourselves feel better, it's worth a fake cleaning. 10 seconds. No big deal.

5. Look for catchlights

A catchlight is when indirect light fills your subjects eyes and lights them up. We're pretty hooked on them, they have an awesome way of bringing the eyes—and entire face—to life. To know if you’re getting a good catchlight, look for the source of light reflecting in your subject’s eyes, and notice how much the eyes light up compared to a direct light or backlit photo. We're secretly crazy about backlighting, but we've noticed most clients prefer a radiant face to a radiant halo of glowing hair at the top of their head. Weird, I know. That said, even as a lover of backlighting, when we're shooting indoors I am a sucker for catchlights, and I'll always choose indirect light in the eyes over the hazy background and darker face you get with backlight. You can get awesome catchlights with indoor window light during the day by having your subject look toward the window. Try it...you'll fall in love with it.