On Drama
As it relates to dessert photos!
Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers, which is NOT what I had promised but rather another behind-the-scenes look at my studio practice. We will get to chicken parm talk, I promise, but we will not get to it until I am done serving on the jury to which I was assigned. On Friday, all subscribers will receive a recipe for the perfect winter salad!
The Photo
During the month of December, when COVID took over our house and we spent weeks inside, I did a lot of baking. I had made something that required egg yolks, and the inevitable leftover container full of egg whites was staring back at me. I decided to throw together some meringue kisses, and when they turned out as cute as they did, I knew I wanted to play around with capturing these dramatic, wild-looking desserts in all of their glory.
In planning this spur of the moment photo shoot, I knew that I wanted to make a dramatic representation of this cookie. One of my favorite baking books of all time is Jesse Szewczyk’s Cookies: The New Classics. I love the way the photographer, Chelsea Kyle, made cookies shine in really unexpected ways, and I wanted to bring that intention to this food photograph. Of course, anytime I search for inspiration, I do my best to credit my sources and make sure I’m being inspired by the original work—not copying it. This has been something of a hot topic in the past in food blogger and food photographer circles. More on that as it relates to AI later this year!
The Props
I love light. I’m crazy about it—I study it all the time, both in my studio and out in the world. One of my favorite and unexpected ways to incorporate light into photographs of food is as a prop. For this photo, I wanted to use it to literally highlight the meringue and draw attention to it in the same way putting it on a pedestal would.
As a result, there were almost no props used for this shoot except for the light itself. The surface, which reads as a marble table, is a tiny, vintage side table that I inherited from my grandparent’s lake house. Of course, I added some extra sprinkles onto the cookie, too, but other than that, it was a very, very simple shoot, unlike the first behind-the-scenes photo that I shared with you.
The Set-Up
I positioned my strobe directly to the right of the subject and raised it to about 5 1/2 feet high. I pointed the light directly at the meringue, and then decided to shape the light using a snoot like the one shown below. This modifier narrows and concentrates the beam of light that comes out of the strobe, which really helped to differentiate the meringue and the background of the photo (which was just the studio floor, where you can see my cat’s food dish making a cameo. I keep it real!).
The Equipment
For this shoot, I kept it relatively simple:
Godox AD400 Pro strobe light and tripod
Canon 6d Mark II camera, trigger, and tripod
Tether cord
Modifier (snoot)
The Post-Production
Again, unlike the first behind-the-scenes photo I shared here, this one was much simpler in terms of post-production because it was a much more straightforward shot. I made some very, very small tweaks in Capture One and then pulled it into Photoshop to add my beloved star filter. In this photo, it’s incredibly subtle, appearing only on to the top of the gold sprinkles.
This is the raw photo, straight out of the camera:
As you can see, the light has already been manipulated to highlight the subject and create a dramatic contrast.
The Final Photo
And there you have it! One ultra-dramatic photograph of a cookie using only manipulated light and some sparkles in Photoshop. Are we still into these posts? Let me know below!
Thanks for reading! I have a big audacious goal to grow this newsletter in 2024. Can you help me out with that and forward to a friend so they can subscribe, too? I appreciate you endlessly! See you back here on Friday for a wintery salad!