Shooting pizzas again. Sorry, but I”ve had a lot on my plate lately :+) and haven’t been able to post as many things as I would have liked to. Here are three examples of outlined pizza photography. I’m pretty happy with the results. I’ve refined my technique a little this time around. I try to improve things a little on every shoot. (a lot, if I can) I’ve added a couple more mirrors, probably totaling 8 or 9. To create as much depth as possible, it’s important not to “over-fill” and to let the darks go dark, but not too dark…. It’s an accuired taste and technique. What I’m getting at is… you can light too much and it’’s the darks that make the difference. Light, dark, light, dark… all the time scrapping the light as I go. That’s how I light the crust. The backgournd should give you some clues about how this is lit.

Most of you guys have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Claudia does…. :+)

I finally finished the portrait project I’ve been working on. I took this “budget” job so that I could try out some techniques I wanted to work on. The budget was so low that I couldn’t afford an assistant and therefore I needed to get the equipment level WAY down. So far down, that I could get everything except the light stands, into one pelican case. Since I’m historically a studio photographer that went on location shoots with most of his studio, I wanted to learn how the “other half” lived. That meant that I had to come up with a lighting kit made out of “on-camera” flashes. I first started out with three heads and then cut it down to three, and usually ended up using just one. I found that the key to working like this is to look for locations that worked for the composition AND the lighting. I learned quite a bit…

This was shot with a SB 800 on an umbrella (shot with 80-200 f2.8 on my Nikon D3)

Shhot with an SB 8000 on a large umbrella (shot with 80-200 f2.8)

Shot with an SB 800 with a large umbrella

I found that one of the hardest things to do was to keep the umbrella, head and stand from blowing over in the wind. It’s hard to justify taking sand bags when you’re attempting to fly as light as possible…. (shot with 28-70 f2.8)

This was shot available light only. Not too often it works out this way, but the light in this room was really nice. (28-70 mm 2.8 zoom)

This was shot with the SB 800 insde a medium box using my 85 1.4 lens

Here are the results from a recent food shoot. I was happy with the results. We tried to keep the backgrounds simple.