We’ve been photographing food again, this time at the AA Rosetted restaurant at Eslington Villa in Low Fell, near Newcastle upon Tyne.

They’ve recently been reviewed by the local press, and were asked for an image of the restaurant to go alongside the article. We decided to create an image where the main subject is a dish from the menu but you also get a feel for how pleasant it is in the restaurant itself.

Luckily for us the restaurant has windows on three sides, so there’s plenty of natural light. This is a good starting point, but on it’s own isn’t really enough to give us the shot we want.

We arrived at the restaurant mid morning, unpacked the kit and then took an ambient meter reading. We want to try and utilise as much of this ambient light as we can, as this gives us a nice, even, natural fill light. It wasn’t quite bright enough for what we wanted though, so the flashguns were unpacked.

Food always looks best when lit from behind, so the first flash was set on a lighting stand behind and to the left of the table which the food was positioned on. We couldn’t have the light directly behind it as the light stand would be visible in shot. We used a shoot through umbrella to give a nice, soft light which spreads over a large area.

We set the power of the flash to be slightly stronger than the ambient light, so enough to light the table but not completely overpower the rest of the scene. In effect we’re using the flashgun as a main light and then the ambient light as a fill light. We also placed a large, white reflector in front and to the left of the plate of food. The front right of the plate was lit quite nicely by the window light, but the left hand side needed a little help.

This by itself would create a reasonably good image, but we want to make more of the actual restaurant, and the background was looking a little dull compared to the well lit table of food. The ambient light from the window just wasn’t quite punchy enough. A second flash was placed on a lighting stand, another shoot through umbrella was used, and the power set to provide a little more light for the background of the shot. It doesn’t overpower the natural window light or the tungsten lamps on the ledge though.

What we end up with is an image that lights the food well, is sympathetic to the ambient, but fills in the background where the light is lacking. The exposure takes into account the trees in the garden, which can be seen through the windows. While we didn’t want these sharp, we also didn’t want them completely under or over exposed.

It’s often overlooked, but the background of photographs can play a crucial part of the success of the overall image, so it needs some attention and thought.

It’s a balancing act, but it’s another example of how flexible it can be using manual hotshoe flashguns on lighting stands. The ease of use, portability and no requirement for mains power makes it an ideal choice for this kind of photography.

You can click on the images in this post to see larger versions. We’ve included two of the many final versions, and also a shot of the lighting set up at top of the page.

For those interested in the technicalities we used a Fuji S5 Pro with a Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens (at f4, ISO 200), and an exposure of 1/40 sec. The flashguns were the excellent manual only Lumopro LP160, mounted on standard lighting stands with a lastolite hotshoe adapter, which allows us to add an umbrella (a Westcott shoot through). The flash power settings were calculated using good old mathematics after taking an ambient reading on a Sekonic light / flash meter.

“Learn to light anywhere”. Four words that have probably changed the way I approach my photography more than any others.

I’ve realised that as photographers we can’t simply rely on the light that we are presented with in a scene. Sometimes we need to visualise what we want to achieve, and to be able to control how much light appears in our images regardless of what we are photographing.

We were recently asked to photograph Matfen Hall Hotel at night. There was a corporate event going on that evening and the hosting company had organised a rotating lightshow to be displayed throughout the night. This is kind of like a large spotlight that spins and rotates, firing light beams into the night sky.

I set up the camera in the gardens of the hotel, took a meter reading at ISO 100, did some maths, set an aperture of f11 and came up with an exposure of four minutes. The first test shot came out like this.

Whilst this first image isn’t too bad, it’s not particularly well balanced. There are quite a lot of dark areas in there that ideally could do with lightening up, but we’re going to need some pretty powerful lights to do that aren’t we?

Well actually, no. Believe it or not we can light up the whole of the hall plus the gardens with a simple hotshoe flashgun. My weapon of choice is a manual flashgun made by Lumopro.

It has a guide number of 100 and is a manual flash with none of this fancy ‘TTL’ metering malarky. You determine the exposure with good old fashioned mathematics, set the required output, and you’re off!

So, here’s how it’s done. I set an exposure of four minutes at f11 to expose correctly for what little ambient light there is. During this four minute exposure  I walk around the scene at a reasonably brisk pace firing flash into the areas that I want to light up. By walking quickly I ensure that there is no visible trace of me on the exposure, and I’m careful to shield the flashgun with my jacket to make sure that all the camera sees is the result of the flash and not the source of it.

I fired a couple of blasts onto the wall, two blasts onto three sections of the hotel, another two blasts on the seats in the garden, then one on the urn of flowers on the pedestal. I also fired to the left and right of the urn to light up the grass. When walking back towards the camera I fired a couple more blasts into the lawn. This walk around takes around three minutes, so I leave the shutter open for another minute before the image is complete.

To see the effect of all this you can click on the two images above for an enlarged view.

There’s no Photoshop trickery going on here, what you see is direct from the camera and is a good example of our principles of getting it right in camera.

I’ve been helping my nephew recently with his photography degree by walking him through a studio session. We spent the first half of the session going through some technical theory, then the second half actually taking some images.

Lighting diagram shown above. Note the ball with the star in denotes the position of the candle.

He’s working on a theme which is all about capturing movement in nature in an abstract form. I noticed a little while ago how interesting smoke from an extinguished candle can be, and what amazing patterns it can produce. Well, smoke is natural, and photographing it well in an abstract way will involve a lot of thought (so good for a project). It seemed an appropriate thing to try.

So, what’s the best way to photograph gently swirling patterns of smoke? To catch it in an abstract way I think it needs to be shot at a high shutter speed, and frozen with flash. This will give us a glimpse of all the turbulence in the air that is so miniscule to us that we don’t notice it, but has an effect on how the smoke travels upwards.

I chose a black background, this was a piece of black cloth held against a wall. Ideally I would like to have used some incence sticks for a constant stream of smoke, but I didn’t have any so I used a candle instead and kept blowing out the flame to get the smoke effect I wanted. The camera was tripod mounted, and I used two off-camera flashguns fired by radio remotes. The flashes were positioned to the left and right of the candle, at right angles to the direction the camera was pointing.

I needed to make sure that no stray light hit the black background as I wanted it to stay completely black. This was done by using squares of card as makeshift gobo’s (go betweens). A gobo allows you to shield an area from light, in the same kind of way that a set of barn doors will. I also used some card to shield the camera lens from light from the flashes, as without these there was quite a bit of lens flare about. If I used my studio lights with spill-kills on as illustrated then this wouldn’t be necessary as these act as a hood and stop stray light from leaking everywhere.

I chose a small aperture (f11) as I wanted as much of the smoke to be in focus as possible, and shot at 1/250 second. The hardest part was getting the smoke in the right place as it just drifts around wherever it wants to. Blowing the candle out as gently as possible did the trick, and at the end of the shoot there were a good selection of images to choose from. Click on the examples below for a larger image.

This post follows up a previous one talking about a new plan of mine to build a lightweight portable lighting set-up which can be used just about anywhere. You can read this post here if you’ve missed it. I ended the post with a promise to test the idea out and see how it all works, and this is the result of that test.

I’ve been working quite a lot recently with studio lighting, and I enjoy the total control that it gives me over the final image. The plan I have though is to use portable flashguns on studio stands rather than mains powered studio flash heads. The flashguns will still be radio triggered, and still fired through the same modifiers as the studio heads (such as softboxes and umbrellas), but can they deliver the quality of light that the studio heads do? I suspected that they could, and I’ve been proved right.

Let’s cover the benefits of this style of photography. Firstly, there’s portability. Two hotshoe flashguns weigh much less than two studio flash heads, and you don’t need to carry mains cables as they are battery powered. The second main benefit is that of cost. A suitable manual flashgun can be picked up for £50 if you don’t already have one, a lighting stand with a hotshoe adapter costs as little as £25 (it doesn’t need to be heavy duty as it’s only holding a flashgun) and a set of radio triggers can be bought for £20 on eBay. A small shoot through umbrella will be around £20, throw in £15 for a charger and set of batteries and you’re all done for £130.

Now we’re all set up and ready to go I had three main questions I wanted answering. The first was just how good a quality of light can you get out of a flashgun compared to a studio light. The second was how quickly the flashes would recycle – would they keep up with the speed that I shoot at. Finally, I wanted to know how easy it was to shoot without the built in modelling lights that the studio heads have – it’s always much easier to focus in a bright environment with modelling lights on rather than in dim light with flashguns.

Regarding quality of light, I can’t really see a difference between the light that the studio heads produce compared to the flashes.

I set my flashguns to shoot through a large umbrella, and if I set the flashgun’s diffuser to the wide setting I’ve found that it can quite easily fill the umbrella with light. Placing this large light source as close to the subject as possible gives a lovely soft light. I found that I used the flash on various power settings, but usually between one quarter and one sixteenth of full power.

This was perfect as it means that the batteries last longer, and the recycle times are fast. I shot over 500 images in this test shoot and the flash only failed to recycle twice, and the same set of rechargeable batteries lasted the full session.

The camera’s autofocus system seemed to cope reasonably well in the lower light. Had I been using studio lights I would have switched the modelling lights on to help, but my flashguns don’t have these so I had to focus in ambient light. Now and then the autofocus assist light on the camera would kick in to help out, but generally it handled it well.

The big plus point for me is portability and ease of set up. I carried just two bags to the shoot, the first was my usual camera bag and the second contained my light stands and umbrellas.  Moving the flashes around once they were set up was so easy, and they aren’t restricted to being near a mains socket so there’s considerable freedom in where you shoot.

In this instance the flashguns were more than powerful enough for what I needed. For jobs where a high output isn’t required but speed is of the essence I can definitely see myself reaching for the speedlites and travelling light rather than heading for the studio.

If you’re looking at photographing food then a good place to start is a search on the internet. If you do this you’ll probably find these recurring ‘top tips’.

They are:

• Don’t use flash, use natural light
• Get the camera on a tripod
• Use a wide aperture (to blur distracting parts of the image).

I was asked to head down to Seaham Hall to photograph a couple of dishes from their nationally renowned ‘White Room’ restaurant. It doesn’t get much better than this, if you’re going to photograph food you might as well photograph something like the quality of the cuisine that’s produced here.

It’s all a question of timing though. I know how hard chefs work at this level and the long hours they put in, so it helps if you can fit in with their busy schedule. Through the day they tend to be running a lunch service and preparing for the evening. After 6pm is generally well out of bounds, so the best option to shoot is just as the kitchen is about to close. I arrived at 9pm when the bulk of the main courses had already been sent – this allowed the chef time to prepare the two dishes for me and then get himself home for a reasonable hour.

Contrary to the opening ‘top tips’ in this post I decided to use flash, not use a tripod, and use a smaller aperture to keep the whole dish in focus – after all, the rules are there to be broken! My new motto in photography is ‘learn to light everywhere’. I really believe that we should be able to turn up to any location at any time with any brief and from that be able to produce a good image.  So it’s dark outside and there is no natural light, there’s a restaurant service going on in the room next door so the lights are low and there’s not an abundance of power outlets? This shouldn’t matter, we should still be able to deliver the goods. As usual with posts in this blog you can click on any of the images for a larger version.

There’s nothing wrong with using flash for food photography, it’s just that daylight is the easy option. The trick is to modify the light to make it softer. I admit that using on camera flash is a recipe (if you’ll pardon the pun) for disaster, and it’s likely it’s this kind of flash that the various websites offering advice suggest avoiding. I’ve recently taken to using hotshoe flashes, lighting stands and umbrellas as a portable studio set up (you can read more about this here), and that’s what I chose to use here. No power sockets required, easy to transport through hotel corridors and quick and quiet to set up (and break down).

Usually when we light a subject with studio lights (or flash) we position the lights in front of the subject – this sounds logical, in fact even obvious, but with food photography you tend to find that you get the best results positioning the lights behind the item. We used a 105cm diameter shoot through umbrella on a lighting stand with a Lumopro flashgun set on half power positioned behind the dish, triggered by a radio remote. In front of the dish was a Lastolite reflector which bounced some of the light back in to gently fill shadows. An aperture of f8 was used to keep everything in focus.

Sometimes I like to select a wide aperture for food photography as this blurs the background, but the White Room is so called for a reason. White table cloths, white plates, white napkins – it’s white! In this contemporary venue there is no colour except for the food, so it doesn’t make sense to blur it as it’s really the only detail in the whole shot. Had there been background detail I may have thought differently, but this wasn’t the case.

So, the usual rules now apply. A larger light source closer to the subject produces a softer light, so the shoot through umbrella is positioned as close to the dish as we can without it intruding into the frame. We light from behind the dish and reflect back in to fill the shadows. We’ve set the white balance on the camera before hand but it doesn’t really matter as seeing there is only one light source and we’re shooting in RAW we can adjust this in post production. The vibrance of the image is increased a little in Adobes excellent ‘Lightroom’ software, and that’s it! We’re done!

Looks good enough to eat? I think so, and if you would like to sample the finished item then I would recommend a visit to Seaham Hall – its an experience to be savoured, that’s for sure.

We’re keeping with the theme of gardening with this post. We were asked to capture images of a garden and present the shots to the garden owners as a gift for their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Any couple who’ve been married for this long deserve something a little special, so to reflect the amount of time they spend working in their beautiful garden we put that little bit extra into preparing their images. We produced a hard backed book with a selection of their favourite photographs in, and we finished each page with a gardening quotation in the footer.

We took a mixture of styles, from low depth of field floral shots to butterflies and bees, as well as a few general overview shots of the garden as a whole.

You can view the album online here:

http://www.elmphoto.co.uk/garden/

Sycamore Gap is a well known beauty spot along the course of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, near Twice Brewed. It’s more commonly referred to these days as ‘Robin Hood’s Tree’, a reference to the 1991 film ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’ starring Kevin Costner.

The scene in the film features Robin Hood (Kevin Costner) and Azeem (Morgan Freeman) who find themselves walking along Hadrians Wall on their way to Nottingham from arrival back in England at Dover! A boy has climbed the tree to hide from the Sheriff’s men, and Robin Hood arrives in the nick of time to save the day.

The tree itself is lucky to still be there. Rumour has it that when it was a sapling it was to be removed, but something more important must have popped up that day and it was left alone to grow into the magnificent specimen that it is today.

Regardless of why it is so famous, it is undoubtedly a beautiful location, and one that is instantly recognisable around the world. This makes it an obvious choice of subject if a customer asks for an instantly recognisable landscape image from the Hadrian’s Wall area. The customer in question is Matfen Hall Hotel, situated a mere half an hour away from the famous view.

Matfen Hall don’t do things by half. If they want a photograph of Sycamore Gap then they want it big. And on a canvas. And in three sections. The brief was a canvas print of four feet high and six feet wide, divided into a triptych of three panels. This is a big ask of any image, so the answer was to head our specifically to photograph it in the highest possible resolution. There are two ways to do this. One is to buy a Hasselblad 39 Megapixel digital camera at a mere £20,000. The other more cost effective way is to use a digital SLR and create one large image out of a number of smaller ones.

So, the image above is a composite image of four different photographs all stitched together in Adobe Photoshop. This gives us a great panoramic viewpoint and also an image of three to four times the size of a single frame. This gives us a fighting chance of getting a file size big enough and with enough detail to enlarge up to the mammoth dimensions needed. To increase the size of the image even more the excellent Genuine Fractals plug-in from OnOne software was used.

The final image was sent to PPD in Newcastle to be printed onto canvas. This last step is just as important as any other in the procedure. At elmnet our monitors are all calibrated so we know that whatever we see on our screen is exactly what we’ll get from PPD. There are many printers who will knock out a canvas for you, but it’s something that’s going to be admired for years to come so you can’t chance this vital step. We wanted the best quality we could get, so we used a printer we could trust. Needless to say we weren’t disappointed.

If you want to see the final result then visit Matfen Hall. Pop in for a coffee or a beer, and ask where the Sycamore Gap canvas is. If you do, let me know what you think.

The ‘Tour of Britain’ cycling event begins in Lincolnshire on the 12th September this year, and arrives in the North East where stage 2 will be contested on the 13th. We’re particularly interested in that date as the race more or less goes past our door, so no prizes for guessing what we’ll be doing!

Setting off from Darlington, and ending with a sprint finish on the Newcastle / Gateshead quayside after 153km, it’s going to be a great race, with well known olympic gold medal winner Bradley Wiggins taking part. If you’ve never seen a pro cycling race before then I would heartily recommend a trip out to a spot along the route so you can see just how incredibly fit these guys are.

As a keen cyclist the race appeals for two reasons. The first is to watch the best in action, but the second is to try and photograph them in an interesting way. The image above was taken in Morpeth during the 2008 event. The traditional way to capture motion is to whack a telephoto on and pan the lens with the subject. This involves tracking the moving subject, and continuing this motion as the shutter is released. This has the effect of blurring the background but keeping the subject sharp. It’s a good technique, and you’ve probably seen it before in other sports such as formula 1 racing.

I was keen to do something different though. Rather than follow the subject with a telephoto I went for a wide angle lens and kept the camera stationary as the cyclists flew past. I wanted to give a real impression of motion, but also wanted to keep the detail of all the spectators that had turned out that day, as that adds real interest to the image. The composition was very important too, and had to be well thought through before the race arrived. The image wouldn’t work as well if the cyclists were obscuring the crowd, so I had to allow for this and estimate where they would be. I framed the shot with the bottom two thirds of the image containing empty tarmac and managed to fire off a couple of test shots on the team cars and motorbikes before the cyclists arrived. The final step was to convert the image to black and white but to paint the fantastic vivid colours of the cyclists team strips back in so they really stand out.

As these guys move so quick there wasn’t much time to get the right shot. Over one hundred cyclists passed the lens in the space of around 30 seconds, it was all over very, very quickly. This year I’ll be photographing the event again, but in a different way. I’m not sure how yet, perhaps I’ll capture them as they get to the summit of one of the big climbs when they are moving a little slower.

Whatever I decide to do I’ll publish the results on the blog and you can let me know what you think.

UPDATE

Sunday 13th September, 16:02

Not long back in from watching the Tour. I decided to see the peleton at the last King of the Mountains stage at High Barns, near Horsley. I got a shot of the three leaders of the stage battling it out at the end of the climb.

Whereas last year I went for a sharp background and blurred cyclists, this year I did the opposite – blurred background and sharp cyclists. I combined the lens panning technique mentioned in this article with a wide aperture and a little slow sync flash to keep the subject sharp but still introduce a ghosted blur effect. I then sharpened the bits I wanted sharp in Photoshop.

So, something different from last year, but I’m quite pleased with it!