Food Portraits with One Light
So what do you do with your down time?
For some of my downtime, I like to setup a light and dabble in different genres of photography.
One genre I’ve worked in off and on for years is food photography. My approach is most often minimalism, focus on a single element or item. Or even finding elements of the food to focus on with some details.
A few days ago I picked up some strawberries and thought they’d make a lovely subject to show off the flexibility of using one light, and a couple of simple elements to highlight.
The Setup
When we start to build, even a minimalist setup for food, we want to think about the layers of the scene.
For instance:
What do we want to highlight?
Selecting a plate, or bowl, that works with the subject.
Then picking out a surface to have be the base layer, the subject and container sit upon.
With the strawberries I used a plate I found at Anthropologie, which I purchased for times like this.
I picked out on of my fave cutting boards. I have a few that I use just for these photos, I never use them as cutting boards. :)
The Lighting, Part 1
For the lighting, I wanted to just focus on one light. To me, the best way to learn how to see and use light is to focus on what you can do with just one light first.
I started with the Nanlite Forza 60C. This is a multi-faceted LED light. It gives you the option to go with neutral light colors like daylight or tungsten balanced light, in a range from around 2700k to 10000k. For this setup I used 5600K and set the white balance in my camera to match.
These lights also do full-spectrum RGB, which means when I want to get creative I can add a splash of color with ease.
Once I had my plate, my surface and light choice, from there I wanted to use both an edgy or “hard” light and soft light, but I started with some drama. With the Nanlite Forza 60C there’s a small hard reflector. It does a couple of things, including adding a slight boost to the light output, and giving it some contained directionality. Because it’s a smaller hard reflector, and reminds me a little of using a snoot, though not quite such a tight beam of light.
With that reflector on, I used a couple of black pieces of foam board to help flag the light a little more, and darken the background.
One of the things I love about this particular setup is the shape of the shadows, of the stems on the strawberries. And, of course, just the play of shadow and light.
Considering Composition
In today’s market I think it’s a good idea to use both landscape and portrait orientation, this provides flexibilty on the use of the images, from social media use cases like Instagram Stories, or posts, to use on websites or even prints.
With that said, I also play with shape of items in the scene. I tend to leave a curved edge playing against a strong or straight edge.
Take a step back or zoom out, as well as zoom in or get closer.
Think about how you may crop the image for final use.
The Lighting, Part 2
After a few shots with this setup, I removed the reflector for the hard light and moved a softbox. This shift immediately gives the strawberries a less dramatic look, as the shadows are mild and not as a focused.
As with the first setup, I used somewhat similar compositional techniques, providing variety, but also visual consistency.
The softbox provides, this lovely, soft light (hence the name!). For a few photos I used just the softbox and then I added a bounce card to fill in the strawberries a little.
Wrapping it all up.
The primary goal of this exercise was to highlight a simple item with a simple light, and show what you can create with simple modifiers.
GEAR:
Nanlite Forza 60C, set to 5600K
Fujifilm X100V
Profoto Clic Box (adapted to the Nanlite Forza)
Foam boards from Artist & Craftsman Supply
A Clamps from Home Depot
BTS photos from the iPhone.