It was a horrible day, and while R went out walking anyway, indoor play seemed like a much better idea to me. Over the course of this week I’ve been looking at a lot of backdrops for still life images, and because this is how many of them are displayed on web sites, I’ve become quite intrigued by food photography. Not enough to want to do it seriously, because there seems to be an awful lot of faffery involved, and I have neither the patience for that, nor the eye for detail I think is required. But as I was planning on making chili con carne for dinner anyway, I thought I’d see if I could bash out a couple of photos of my culinary effort for posterity.
On the whole I’m reasonably pleased with how this came out, though I’m quite annoyed that I didn’t notice earlier that I’d smeared something on the handle of the green spoon (proving my point, really, about lack of attention to detail). I laid everything down on the floor at the end of the sitting room so that I was getting directional light via the conservatory, and set up the camera as I would for a lightpad flat-lay – that is, attached to the horizontal arm of the tripod, with the front element of the lens absolutely parallel to the floor (checked by laying my phone on the back screen and using the compass app as a spirit level). After I’d taken a few frames the sky blackened and the heavens opened, so I tried bouncing some extra light from a softbox off one wall of the conservatory; this did work, but I didn’t like the resulting photos as much as the ones with purely natural light.
I’d just finished my shoot and was dismantling my gear when R arrived back from Evesham, soaked through from the downpour. By the time he’d changed into dry clothes I’d cooked up some rice and re-warmed the chili con carne, earning myself valuable Wife Points – I think he’d be more than happy for me to take up food photography, if he always got to eat the subject afterwards. While we were having our coffee it occurred to me that I really should have uploaded my files and checked them before dinner, but luckily when I did, they were fine. Otherwise you’d have been looking at a photo of the contents of the dishwasher.
