Composition and Cropping Your Images - Community Education Event

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here for our community education series, and we have Adam Barnes of Picture Perfect Meals, and our subject tonight is cropping and composition of your images to try and get them more readily accepted at food porn sites like Tastebotting and Food Gawker and those, and just really to make them look better in general. So I'm gonna turn it over to Adam, and he's gonna take it from there.

It's 8 o'clock. Excuse me, it's 8 o'clock in case anybody was wondering. Thanks, Jeff, for hosting another one of these great events. I always enjoy them. Also, my apologies to those of you who had set aside time last week. We had a medical emergency in our family here, and those things are never at a convenient time. So I apologize, and I thank you for joining us tonight. Yeah, composition and cropping. If you have a well-composed image, you will be— you should be able to crop it down. I always recommend cropping for Food Gawker and Taste Spotting yourself, and a lot of people have a hard time somehow envisioning it, envisioning their image square. If your images are created with good compositional principles, then you really shouldn't have any trouble just simply squaring it off. What is composition? The human eye is not designed to be static and It was told to me that that's because at one time in history we were probably something's dinner, and so we needed to be alert and aware. And so we have these eyes that like to move around. Composition is basically leading the eye to what we want it to see. And the tools of composition are color, form, shape, light, direction. Even simple compositions have to have some kind of movement. By the way, just as an aside, we seem to be having a problem with the screen share here. It's darkening everything up. But so just bear that in mind. Simple compositions. This is a very, very simple composition. You just have this cake and you have the knife. What makes it work is that you have this knife and this napkin below. Your eye goes into the cake, and as busy as the cake is with all the blackberries and the peaches and the texture of the cake itself and the pineapple, you can actually get stuck in there, and that ends up feeling uncomfortable. You don't actually see the image. The knife down below, because it picks up— it does two things: it creates another shape which naturally moves the eye down to it, and also the color of the old knife handle picks up a little bit on the colors of the fruit. And so your eye, even in the simplest of compositions, needs to move back and forth like that. You hear a lot about the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is basically when you divide your canvas, your camera frame, into something that looks like this in your mind's eye. Now you could actually, for those of you who use DSLR cameras, especially the more advanced DSLR cameras, you can actually get screens that are lined in this particular way. But I mean, for the most part, if you could imagine this and use your mind's eye to impose this kind of a grid on the photographs, you know, when you're looking through your camera, the— you'll be able to make this work. The principle here is that you take things off-center. When we put things right smack in the middle of a frame, it becomes static. Putting things off to one side, for example, here, it doesn't have to exactly match. The, you know, the absolute intersection. The point is to get it off, and what you've done in this particular shot of this hamburger is we've taken the graphic weight, the visual weight of this hamburger, and shifted it off-center to a point that is roughly in that upper left quadrant. Like I say, it doesn't have to be exactly centered there, but what you now have is a certain dynamic that exists in the image. Your eye is drawn into it, and then it circles around the onion rings, and it goes back to that point. If this hamburger were just simply in the middle of the shot, it would actually be kind of boring, and it would lose interest very, very quickly. The same principle applies here. Where again the— well, this has a couple of interesting compositional points to it, but dealing with the rule of thirds first, the, the brightest object in this photograph, which is that little ramekin type thing that has the syrup and butter in it, again, it's basically at that, the intersection of the upper right lines. It's off-center. That's what draws your eye in, and then your eye follows all the French toast all the way around back to that same point. The other compositional, um, uh, point that I can make with this shot— let me get the shot that doesn't have the, uh, the lines on it— is that you work with color and you work with texture and form and interrupting patterns. What you have here is— here we go— alright, you have a pattern of this French toast. Visually, it's all kind of the same, even though the shapes are different, even though each piece of toast is at a different angle, and then you have it sort of dotted with the color of the blackberries and the strawberries. All those things are similar kind of conceptually. They're all food, all right, and they're similar texturally. They have, you know, the bread is kind of rough, the outside of the strawberry is rough, it has a little, I guess, little seeds, little indentations. The blackberries have the form because they're a bunch of tiny little berries on one kind of central stalk. And then you have this little ramekin with the— I know ramekin's not the right word, but it'll have to do because I can't think of the right one— with the syrup. Apart from being the brightest object, okay, which focuses your eye and gives it an anchor point, it also is the object that is different. And this is a great trick to use where you're balancing textures, but you bring in something to interrupt the pattern. And it is by interrupting that pattern that you get— by interrupting the pattern, your eye actually reinforces the pattern. You go there and then you go around the pattern and you go back to that point and you go around and around this image in a circular kind of way. So that's one of the really good principles. The other thing is patterns. Patterns don't always have to be perfectly even like they are here. In this shot, we have the patterns of these, of these sandwich rolls. I interrupted the pattern on the right-hand side of it. The pattern is implied.. And then instead of using a spoon that would run the full length of this, this parchment paper with the rolls that would have balanced the image in a different way, I used a shorter little spoon and used a bunch of flour on the background to balance the image. And so again, the eye is continually moving around. It's drawn to the spoon and it goes back. And it's— this is one of the principles of composition, of drawing our eye away from the subject to reinforce the subject. Okay, let me see, where are we at here?

Looks like we just lost Adam momentarily. I'm sure he will rejoin us in just a minute. Hope you're enjoying it so far. We've had some pretty bad storms here, so he might be experiencing— there he is, he's back.

Okay, I'm back. Sorry, I have no idea what happened. I was gonna get to talking about the idea of the rule of thirds and again how it is that that works to throw us, to throw the eye off balance, and so the eye follows its natural instinct to flow around what it's looking at. As a general rule, you really don't want to just take a picture of something flat overhead in the middle of in the middle of the frame because your eye will just get stuck there. Even a shot like this one, okay, which is basically, um, it's a big circle. The spoon breaks the— first of all, the circle is off-center and some portion of that circle is cut off. The reason for that is if the circle were perfectly centered in there, your eye would just go in there and stay there. But because the circle is partially cut off, it bounces your eye. It takes your eye almost like a, you know, it kind of slingshots your eye back around the image. And so you start looking at this cheese on top of this piece of French bread. Your eye goes out. It gets slung around the image again. And then it gets picked up again by the spoon, which is stopping it from going out of the lower corner. If you were to take that spoon out, um, again, your eye would get stuck up there. You would just get stuck in the circle. The spoon gives an element of interest that draws your eye down and at the same time prevents it from dropping completely out of the shot. The same thing applies to just the suggestion of a glass at the top of the image. Working with a lot of composition is bringing in small elements. You want to keep your eye in your— in the canvas, in the frame. And using small elements like the— I think it's a glass coming in at the very top of that frame keeps your eye from just getting lost up there in the white and brings your eye back to what it is that you want seen, which in this case is, is the soup. The other thing that we use is color. In this particular shot, we're using green, although the focus, again, you've got this piece of pie, all right? So that's what draws us in, but what keeps our attention focused on this pie is the use of the green throughout this, and this is using color to lead your eye around the photograph. You go, you see this slice of lime on top of this whipped cream, and you see this beautiful piece of pie. But there are also— you have the green of the fork coming in at the bottom of the shot, you have the green of the limes coming in at the back, and you have the green of a lime in this sort of terracotta-colored bowl. So what you— what we've done here is actually created a series of triangles that the eye follows around, and they all lead your eye right back to the center point. Of this piece of pie. So you're using your color to balance— to balance your subject. And again, this is the principle of composition, keeping the eye moving around so that it feels natural to the eye in such a way that it always returns to what it is that you want your—

Looks like he dropped off. Must be having some problems with the storms down there. We had some really nasty thunderstorms and lots of rain today. Here he is back again.

Okay, we're back again. We'll try again. I don't know what keeps happening because we're hardwired in here. But the other thing that we use is directional lines. This shot here, which a lot of you are familiar with because I used it for a tip on Google+ a while back, or actually a few days ago, is a shot of a drink. This is seemingly Okay, just a very straightforward head-on shot, but in fact this shot is based on diagonals. The drink, the cherry, the little dish of cherries, and the green bottle create one diagonal. Okay, and that is a diagonal of color because this, this image, while not entirely monochromatic, is essentially those three items are essentially the only color in this photograph, and the eye seeks to follow the familiar. So you have the red of the maraschino cherry and the kind of amber color of the, of the whiskey and the red and the green. That is one diagonal line that exists. There's a second diagonal line that reinforces that, that comes in from the tongs. All right, these ice tongs go and they go behind the glass and they lead to the white decanter of some sort behind the green bottle. And so even though it's not obvious, it's very comfortable. You go to the glass, you go out, you follow the tongs to the back, then you go to the bottle, the cherries, back to the glass, and you're following around in this kind of elliptical circle. That is based on sort of an internal composition based on diagonals. Other patterns that you can use— a more— let me find this image here— a more obvious diagonal pattern is here. Okay, this is very clearly based on diagonals, you know, the obvious diagonal being from lower left to upper right of the sandwiches having been cut in half. There's a less obvious diagonal of the upper left sandwich meeting the lower right sandwich, and that is creating a line that takes us down in the image. And so you have this crisscrossing which keeps your eye moving around. The half circle of this little ramekin filled with the jus for the, you know, it's a French dip. Again, it bounces your eye back into the photograph. You go, you kind of look around, and it's almost like a bumper in a— like a pinball, you know, it takes your eye back in. The same thing, your eye gets drawn down by the brightness of these pickles on this old fork, but again, you're taken right back up into the image. And this again is the whole principle of composition, to keep your eye moving, your viewer's eye moving around the image and keep them returning to your point of interest. We'll get out of the screen share. Circles too. I mean, we're— here's another example of a repetitive pattern. Let me just pull it up here. It's here somewhere. Here we go. Alright, this is another one. Again, it's patterns. Alright, repetitive patterns. This shot is kind of interesting because there's only two elements in this shot. There's lines and there's a half circle. That's it. If you break it down in pure graphic terms, the cheese straws are nothing but horizontal lines. This brush is nothing but a vertical line. The break in this wood, in this cutting board, is just another horizontal line. Even the space is a horizontal line, and the space— there's— I deliberately took out one of the cheese straws because when you interrupt a pattern, you reinforce the pattern.. And that's a very, very effective compositional technique. When you get— and so what you have is, again, the eye is looking for what it's familiar with, so it's seeing lines. And then that pattern, again, the pattern of just abstract lines in this shot is interrupted by this little curve of this little ceramic dish that bounces your eye back. The other thing that you have here is this color. Everything here is basically brown and gold, but then you have this intrusion of this sort of aqua color. Again, it draws your eye to it and back up the, the, the pastry brush and back down through the image. It's all about moving the eyes around. Texture, too, is one of the things that affects composition. This here is a series— I believe this is the right image— of— yeah, of 3 shots, all of the same thing. The left is actually largely where we started, but you then have this great-looking salad, but it's, it's busy. There's all this activity, there's, there's all this, and you go in there and you get lost and nothing happens. You just, you just stay there. It doesn't have any context. I brought in the spoon and I placed it sort of to the, the upper right of the plate, and it just didn't work. I still kept getting stuck down in the salad. So then I moved the spoon to the front of the salad, and all of a sudden you have a little bit of a counterbalance. And again, it's interrupting visually a pattern. You have this pattern of color and shape and form and everything that's in this salad, and you have this simple, straight, plain spoon to counterbalance it. So that starts to work a little better, but I felt that there was just not enough— it was too static at that point. I just felt that it— the way it was just coming in and paralleling the line of the plate was a little too static. In the third shot, which was the final shot, what we did was we used the spoon instead of as being just a completely rigid object. We gave it a little bit of form by using the bowl. So now we had something that was plain and fairly weighty and visually simple to counterbalance the busyness of the salad. And I also added a tomato and a cucumber in there to pick up again on the, the colors in the salad, and so then providing a degree of visual unity. So textures and opposing textures— a lot of composition is creating an opposite quantity to what it is that we want people to see. Another good example of that is this shot here. This is a very, very simple, simple shot. It's red tomatoes and there's a bright yellow one in the mix there. And then there are— there's the tomato stalk. You can actually— you could take the tomato stalks out and your focus is then more— I mean, they're not completely out of that shot, but they're out far enough. They don't draw as much attention. So again, you're taking a pattern and you're interrupting it. Sorry. I mean, this is a very simple, direct, fun kind of whimsical composition, just all these one things. And everything is, is, is circles. It's like a study in circles. The tomatoes are basically circles even though they're oval. The yellow tomato is a circle. The pan is a circle. The handles off the pan are also circular. Again, we broke, or I broke the, uh, I broke the edge of this circle, and this is important to do when dealing with things, because again, it forces us to go back in and around, and we stay in the picture. If it was fully centered and there were no break, then we would just get lost there. We would just simply get stuck there. At this point, does anybody have any questions?

I don't have anything yet, Adam. I did put the thing in the bar saying to put your questions in the comment bar if you have any.

Okay. Alrighty. Alrighty, alrighty, alrighty. Here's another example of dealing with circles. Okay, this is all a study in circles. And again, at the edges of the frame, the circles are broken. And there's, you know, there's one full circle in this whole shot. And that's what keeps you just kind of going in and out and around, and it keeps you focused in there.

Alright, we lost him again. I'm sure he'll be right back, but it's kind of interesting the way he's showing how to use circles to make your, your images, or shapes to make your images more interesting and to keep your eyes traveling in a pattern. I know I'm really guilty of putting that circle full force in the center of the image and keeping it whole. So it's something you really want to think about. There he is.

What is it that you don't want to think about?

Oh no, about what you— about breaking the circle up. I'm very guilty of using a whole circle, I was saying.

Well, the tendency is to, to just put your plate in the middle of it and just take the picture. But you don't serve your— from a compositional point of view, you don't serve yourself well by doing that because your viewer's eye is just getting stuck. And when it gets stuck, that's what gets interpreted as boring. Now, I was talking about not putting something exactly in the center of the frame. Well, there are exceptions to that rule, and this is one of them. This is exactly centered in the frame, but again, there is a— there's triangles being made here. It's centered in the frame, but what keeps the interest is that you have that bottle of beer on the left-hand side, and then you have a glass full of a glass of beer on the other side. And so while you are centered on seeing these sweet potato fries, your eye again is pulled back and to the background elements, it goes along the patterning of the countertop and comes back. All of these things are the supporting players. And it's just important to realize the principle that simply putting something on in front of the camera, you will not always— you won't always just get the best result. This is a lot of what propping is about. You know, propping is designed to make an interesting photograph to lead your viewer's eye around. And that, I mean, it all— yeah.

We do have a question. I'm not going to even try this name, I'm sorry. Luke Como en Casa has, "Have you ever tried to compose in spirals, bending the table plane and putting several units in patterns?" I personally have not.

But I mean, there's no reason not to do that. I mean, all of this, this brings up an interesting point. You know, photography is entirely subjective, and what it is that works for one person does not necessarily work for another. You know, there are people who are extremely artistic in their approach to food photography.

We lost your picture, Adam.

Oh, I'm sorry, what?

We lost your picture.

Which picture was that?

There you are, you're back.

Okay, all right. Yeah, I didn't lose it. There are people whose approach is extremely artistic where they use very dense shadows, where they use extremely graphic compositions. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, all— at the end of the day, all this is about developing your ideas. I mean, what these Hangouts are about is giving you the tools to create the kind of images that you want to create. I mean, there are certain general standards But what defines a successful image for you is entirely up to you. And, you know, I mean, there's certain principles that generally follow, but, you know, art, a lot of it is about taking the rules and bending them to apply to your own personal aesthetic. And at the end of the day, the person who needs to be satisfied is you.

Okay, we have a question from Kirsten Mattis. I end up with 3 to 4 similar photos. I find it hard to pick one. Do you have any advice on how to pick your best image when there are similarly composed photos?

It's hard sometimes. Um, find the one, find the one that that feels the best to you. If they're similar, then there's been a movement of some kind. Something is different about them. Find the one that just works best for you, that you think is the best composition. It's a very difficult problem to solve. I end up with that problem a lot. The way I approach things, though, is back in the day when we were all using film and we were using large format 4x5 and 8x10 cameras, the luxury of shooting many, many shots of the same thing was generally not there because it was very, very, very expensive to do. And so a lot of still life photographers, and food is still life photography, developed, you know, the idea of creating sort of one definitive shot. A tripod really helps to do that. I'm a big proponent of tripods, and tripod is an essential tool for effective composition. Because, I mean, millimeters can make a difference in composing an image between having a really perfectly balanced image and having one that is just, you know, just not quite right. And using a tripod not only to support the camera but to lock down your composition will actually take a lot of those kind of decisions out of your They'll take it out of the things that you need to do to get that photograph on your blog or published. It's always tough. If the differences are just simply because you've moved position, there was some camera shake, I would really get a tripod and decide on the image you want. And take it. Again, part of the point of exercising sort of good composition skills is so that you don't have to take multiple photographs. Putting multiple photographs that are essentially the same shot on, you know, on your blog page or whatever, A, slows the page down, and B, you're not really conveying any new information to your reader. And as photographers, our job is to convey information. What we're doing, okay, is conveying a message, whether, you know, that message is how good your food is or that message is how great this car is, or that message is how beautiful the animal is, or that message is how tragic this war is. What we do is communicate ideas to people, and it's not just about taking a picture of your food, it's about getting your viewer and engaging their appetite and engaging their emotions, and people respond to what feels good to them. I mean, they respond to visually, you know, the idea of a plate of food, but to keep their attention, you need to make that plate of food stand out in certain ways. And that is what composing an image effectively is about. What you're trying to do is continually push their attention back to what you want to see. Now, all of this really takes place on a subliminal level. It's not that people think this way. You know, I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and so over years of shooting advertising, and particularly, you know, you learn to— you learn sort of what the psychology is behind an image. But as a blogger Your photograph is your calling card, and if you want it to be as engaging as you can make it, and this is where the principles of composition come in. You know, compositions can be very simple. They don't have to be complex. There are many photographers who do very, very, very simple very graphic compositions. They're beautiful. There are others who do, you know, very densely propped photographs that are equally beautiful. It's all about getting your vision of what your food expresses out. And composition is one of the critical tools. There's lighting and there's composition. There's propping and there's food styling. Those are the primary elements of— sorry, I think we may even lose power here. Those are the primary elements of successful food photographs.

Okay. No other questions right now.

Okay.

Having a bad storm there now again still, Adam, or?

Well, lights keep flicking on and off, so I don't know where we're at with this thing.

Okay.

Um, okay, so where do we go here? Um, I mean, does anybody have any questions? I mean, they don't necessarily have to be about composition, um, you know, regarding cropping or, or any of these other things.

I do. Is it better to try and crop the image to what you want it to in the camera or on your screen when you're working on it?

Ideally, you should crop it in the camera. I mean, the viewfinder, you should— or I think ideally what you should do is create the image using the full frame of your camera because that's what it's for. But you all, you need to bear in mind, like, particularly if you're interested in submitting things to, like, well, these food porn sites.— you know, this is basically a full-frame image from the camera. Okay, you need to bear in mind if you're gonna crop it, and I really strongly recommend cropping it yourself and not sending it to— not letting them do it. You need to be able to see this in your mind's eye to, you know, see where your square cropping is. I recommend using the full frame because that's The most important picture is the one that goes on your blog. I mean, the food gawker pictures and taste-budding pictures and all that, I mean, they're important for the distribution of what you're doing, but they're really secondary photographs. And— but if your main photograph, if the photograph going on your blog is executed properly and is properly composed, then it will crop— it should crop very easily and nicely down. There are exceptions to that rule. The other thing that I do a lot of times when I have a composition that I really like and I think it might be too tight, because that's what I get most, particularly by Food Gawker, that's what I get most refused for is they say my compositions are too tight. I happen to like tight compositions, but that's my taste, is I will pull back. And I don't think I did it in this particular case, but I will pull back from the, from the shot and leave more room around it so I can get a square crop off Actually, you have a similar kind of thing here. So I can get a square crop off without cramping up the image too much. But again, if it's— you know, if you have a good composition, it should just crop down square very easily. And if you just set, you know, in your imaging software a 6x6, 72 DPI frame, and just basically center it on what your image is. It really should not be a problem. I know a lot of people find it intimidating, but it's really kind of— it's really a little bit of common sense. And try— I mean, you have to use your imagination too. You kind of have to use your mind's eye when you're photographing and sort of create a sort of a mental mask inside your viewfinder or on your screen where you can see how your image will crop square. You just kind of— or you can actually, especially if you use— if you're not looking through a viewfinder, It's very easy to make a mask, basically a piece of black card and cut out, you know, that's cut to the size of your screen, and then cut out a square in the middle of it and use that mask, and that will help you compose your images so they could crop square a little bit more successfully. Going back to the issue of patterns. Here again, although we have the rule of thirds overlay on this shot, again is what you have is just patterns, the, the stalks of this asparagus going from front to back, all these patterns, and then that again being picked up and repeated by the fork and the edge of the plate. So you have these very long patterns going straight into the back. I mean, that's a lot of what composition is about, is creating internal patterns. They're, they're a little bit subliminal. You have another idea here. This is, this is, it is not that there's a specific pattern in terms of the graphic, but what you have is a pattern of color. You have all these different colored carrots, you have, and then you have the pattern of their shape. And again, that pattern is interrupted, although echoed, by this spatula on the left-hand side— and the handle of the spatula actually picks up again on the shape of the carrots. So you have all this internal stuff going on that— and it's the internal stuff that makes photographs interesting. It keeps people looking at them.

Alright, we had a couple questions now, Adam. Ronnie Keller wants to know, what would be a few basics for new photographers, the must-knows? I guess she's talking about how to go about taking a good picture.

Alright, from a compositional point of view, the rule of thirds is, is very important. This idea of where you are putting your, where you are putting the elements of your photograph. And again, to go back to explain it, you want the important elements of your photograph to be on or near the intersection of these lines. You just don't want it to be smack in the middle. And you want to try and prop in an interesting way. And it's, you know, it's the props or the other elements of the composition. That, I mean, they're there to, to, let's go with this image here. Yeah, okay. They're there to re-emphasize your, your subject. And the propping is what lends visual interest. Just keep The rule of thirds is a great place to start and just keep practicing putting your, your, your, your object, your subject of the photo, like in this photo, this ranch dressing is almost at an exact intersection of those, of those lines. And then everything else around it is really just propping. And the, but the propping relates to the dressing. It's vegetables, it's you know, the ingredients of a salad. And then the idea, you know, it's in a Ball jar, so it has a little bit of sort of a country homemade kind of flavor to it. And so you have this gingham background and you have this basket. Again, all of these are compositional elements. They're props, but they are compositional elements. You have the gingham, which is one pattern. You have the basket, which is a complementary pattern. And then you have the patterns of color, form, and shape. You have these peppers up here, you have these tomatoes down here, so those things relate. And there's actually a central line that goes down this image between those, between those colors. And then you have the greens and you have the asparagus and, and you have all the stuff coming in. You have the shape of the jar echoed again in the circles of the peppers and the tomatoes and the avocado down there. And then you have the texture of this basket picked up again in these little sprigs of dill and again right there in the tips of the of the asparagus. So it's about creating a sense of visual unity. And bear those things in mind. Look, these things take a long time to— it takes a long time to develop an awareness of all of these things, and a lot of the awareness is kind of intuitive. But, you know, intuition largely comes from practice. And if you're starting out, you know, use the idea of the rule of thirds to help guide you. And experiment with it and play with it. Light and shadow also form compositional elements. You know, anything that has mass Anything that has visual mass becomes a compositional element. And pay attention to that. You know, don't just settle for the first shot you take. I mean, it does— it takes time. Digital photography is, in a sense, free. Again, coming from where I came from, where I started, it was film, and film was expensive to process and to buy, so it costs something to make a photograph. Digital photography in that sense is, once you own the camera, basically free. And so, you know, take the time to make different images. Walk around— when you set your plate out, walk around. Don't just Don't just set it down there and then take a picture. Walk around it a little bit. And as you walk around, you'll see how the light changes around your plate. And you'll see how the elements in your photograph change, and that changes your composition. And there is an angle at which you will be better served, where your dish will be better served.. And sometimes that does take a little bit of effort. But find some interesting props and, you know, use the rule of thirds and the other things that we've talked about, about making sure that, you know, your eye doesn't go wandering out of the frame. So you want to keep things that keep bouncing your eye back into the frame and back up onto your subject.

Great. Alright, we have another question here. What about symmetry? How can you make a standard dish for two, by example, something like a Valentine's dinner? So how can you make something that is exactly alike look good?

You want— so you're talking about photographing two dishes simultaneously?

Yeah, what about symmetry, making a dish for too, so.

If you're talking about, I mean, photographing two dishes simultaneously, again, symmetry is balance. If you have two plates, okay, both with filet mignon and a shrimp on them and some asparagus asparagus. Set them up in a nice relationship to each other, say for example a diagonal relationship to each other. Okay, one lower right, one upper left, for example. So you have established a visual relationship between them. Then bring in, for example, the edge of a bottle of champagne or a bottle of wine or something, say in the upper right corner. Corner, bring in a napkin, a piece, a couple of pieces of cutlery, or napkin ring, or something that sets the scene to some degree. And, you know, and then you're there. Then you have to work with it until, you know, you get the right framing and the right balance that you're looking for. For in the image. But symmetry is a very powerful tool. If you have two identical plates of food, it's— I mean, you can do really cool things with that. I think it's— I'm trying to think if I have an image here that would reflect that, but I can't think of one or I'd pull it up. But symmetry is a very powerful tool. I mean, symmetry goes back to the shot that I had up earlier. This shot is about symmetry. All right, it's not about like perfectly balanced symmetry, but it is— it's about the evenness of the distribution of things.— this shot is totally about symmetry. There's absolutely centerpiece, and then they're balanced by two things on, on the outside. And it's a question of, you know, the more, the more primary elements you get involved in a shot, the more complicated it becomes to produce. If you have two plates of equal value, if you will, that is to say you're featuring a dinner for two with filet mignon and each of those plates is, you know, served with filet mignon and shrimp and asparagus or whatever, where those plates have equal value, that actually complicates your situation somewhat— you then have to compose so that they're each given the value to the photograph that they each warrant. And the best way to do that is by using strong linear patterns, diagonal patterns, vertical patterns, lateral patterns, and relationships. By patterns, I mean relationships between the two plates. And then filling in the spaces in such a way that you would, you know, the napkin, the fork, whatever, the additional propping would just bring your eye back into focusing on those plates.

Okay, we have another question. Renee Dobbs wanted to know if you saw the article on the perfect Pinterest picture, and if so, if you have any thoughts on that.

No, I didn't. I should probably read it. I, I don't know what the perfect Pinterest picture would be. I think a good photograph will always draw attention. If it's an interesting subject and if it's an interesting photograph, I think it will, it will, it will, it will get people's attention. I, I'll look for it, Renee. I'm assuming it's on Google+ somewhere. I'll definitely take a look at it. I've heard a couple of people mention that. Even you, Chef Dennis, I think one day mentioned you wanted to— I think you mentioned that you were more comfortable shooting horizontally than vertically, whereas I'm actually the exact opposite. I really prefer to shoot vertically. But, um, but you were saying you wanted to shoot, get more practice shooting vertically for Pinterest, right?

Because it shows better now. The vertical image is huge on Pinterest.

Well, it's bigger, yeah. It's much bigger. But I still think that a well-crafted image of an interesting subject will get people's attention. I think that there's a danger and, you know, I went through this. There's a little bit of a danger when we start designing things for Food Gawker or designing things for interest, or designing things for whatever. I went through a thing where, especially early on, because I was absolutely outraged that they would refuse one of my images, so I thought, what do I have to do to, you know, be consistently accepted? And I figured out what at that time they were looking for, but, you know, it didn't make me happy. They weren't the kind of photographs that I wanted to make. And so I find I returned to making the kind of photographs that I like to make because that's what makes me happy. And I think that's what makes, you know, Picture Perfect Meals what it is in the sense that visually what it is. It's how I see things. And as photographers, you know, you don't have to be— I mean, I happen to be a professional photographer, but we're all photographers here. We use cameras to communicate things, and we need to communicate our ideas. There's a real danger to falling into paint-by-numbers, you know. You don't want your photographs to look the same as everybody else's. Else's. You really don't. Now, there may be things— it's probably likely that a big vertical photograph will get more attention than a horizontal photograph on Pinterest, but, you know, the trade-off to that seems to be that on— is it— what's that one chef, Food Daily? The one where they put up— Food Porn Daily. Food Porn Daily.

Mm-hmm.

Well, they seem to require all horizontal shots. So, you know, it gets a little tricky when you're trying to cater too much to the food porn sites. I understand their importance, and I understand, you know, we all rely on them for the distribution of our of our posts. But I think, you know, to thine own self be true. I think if you make images that are strong and that make you happy and that are well-crafted— and, you know, photography takes some work. I mean, to be good at it, you have to make a certain degree of commitment, and you do have to invest a certain amount of time. You know, it doesn't matter what you shoot with, okay, whether it's a sort of a pocket point-and-shoot or whether it's a, you know, big old, you know, digital DSLR. It doesn't matter what— it really doesn't matter what you shoot with. What matters is what— how you are expressing your ideas. And the ideas come from the mind. The camera is just nothing but a machine. And it's your ideas, I think, that will get you noticed with a well-crafted image. That, you know, and to make a well-crafted image does require some investment of time in understanding what the principles of composition are. Why is composition important? You know, it's because it appeals to sort of a natural process for human beings to look at things and for their eyes to move around. And there's a craft to it. And it's obviously worth taking the time to invest to the degree that you can and that you want to But your images should be yours. It's dangerous to— I think it's dangerous to cater too much to Pinterest or Foodgocker or whoever else because those things change. You know, Foodgocker can get bought out or have another different editorial staff and the whole thing will change. Same thing for Pinterest. You know, these things aren't permanent, and then the things that we thought worked so much to our advantage end up working to our disadvantage. So really just try and hold to the things that make you happy, you know, the images that you like. And of course there'll be a process of growth, and there'll be a process of, you know, I look at things that I used to love and I look at them now like, what was I thinking? But, you know, That's just part of growing. That's just— you grow as, as a photographer, as an artist, you know.

That's good. Well, you know, I think you're right about the growth. It's, it's as we learn more techniques, and sometimes our tastes change too as things in our lives change, so we tend to see things differently.

But I get bored is part of the problem I have, um, where I end up feeling like I'm taking the same picture over and over and over again. And, you know, that, that could be a real problem, in which case, you know, I mean, there's certainly nothing wrong with striving, okay, to improve. I mean, if making a photograph that you feel meets sort of Pinterest's— I don't want to say standard or requirement, but that kind of Pinterest vibe that meets that, that if, you know, that's a challenge to you— 9 o'clock— that's a challenge to you that will help you grow as a photographer, then in that sense there's nothing wrong with it. Although I spent a fair amount of time on Pinterest, and I don't know that I've seen any kind of a commonality that would suggest to me that there's sort of a formula that will, you know, make it any more or less successful. I think if your content of your food is good and the images that you make are as arresting and interesting as you can make them, that's probably the best prescription for success in that regard. That I can think of.

Sounds good. Okay, but there is a lot to be said for Pinterest these days. In fact, we're going to have a whole session in our virtual conference on Pinterest because it is bringing so many hits to our sites, you know, so we want to give it some—

I love Pinterest. We get a huge amount of traffic from Pinterest.

Yeah, it's a great source, and we've got some people talking about it and the science of it as well as how to really use it. So hopefully that'll give us some clues. And if we can put your methods of photography to it, that'll even put us further ahead.

Well, yeah, I mean, they'll apply to that. They'll apply to, you know, I— the person that we want is the viewer. We want to engage their emotion, their attention, and their appetite. And that's You do that, you know, with photography and people more and more are realizing that, you know, this is your calling card. It's the first impression anybody has of your blog, of who you are, of what you're offering. And, you know, it can be— I know photography is a difficult thing. And perhaps that's an unfair standard in a certain sense, but reality is what it is. You know, people respond, especially in the— all of us have grown up in a world where we're bombarded with visual information, television, from billboards, now online. And our response, you know, we— almost subliminally have a standard to which we respond. And that's obviously what all of us are striving here to do, is to, you know, meet and raise that standard to, you know, gain the trust and the interest of the people who are viewing our our product.

You mentioned something before, too, and I wanted to ask you about it and put you on the spot, too. You say that sometimes you feel like you're taking the same picture over and over again. When you feel that way, what do you do to break out of that rut?

Sometimes I'll, like, use a completely different light source. You know, I'll change something drastically. You know, if I've been using like a softbox, or which is basically window light, then I may go to a spotlight, which is a very hard, direct, like sunlight kind of source. Sometimes I'll choose a different lens, or I'll choose a different angle. Sometimes I'll get real, real low Just anything. Look, we produce 5 posts a week and they're productions. You know, they're— Cheryl does the writing and then we photograph them, and just the way we happen to photograph is— it's a production. It's a lot of work and You, uh, sometimes you— there's, there's time pressure, you know, I have other things to do as well. So sometimes you, you just kind of continue with, with something that's working for now. And I mean, that's normal, that's just a normal part of this kind of a process. Um, but it's at that point that sometimes they'll say, I just gotta stop doing this. And I have to do something. And sometimes it's as simple as really changing the light from one side of the set to another, or sometimes getting out a new prop, or saying, well, you know, let's— instead of shooting a bowl of soup, let's shoot a soup spoon full of soup, you know, just to do something different. Because everything you know, has its routine.

So something different doesn't necessarily have to be changing your technique or how you're shooting. It can be just changing what you're shooting and how you're seeing what you're shooting.

Technique— there's only— I mean, cameras are machines. They operate within certain parameters. And you can use them in different ways. You can overexpose images, you can use them creatively in different ways, but there's fundamental limitations to what you do there. This is a fundamental limitations to what you're gonna do with light and still remain within the realm of what you're trying to accomplish. So it's a change of idea. You know, if I've been shooting everything by a certain kind of light, you know, I may just— I may actually leave the studio and go actually shoot with a real window and shoot in a real— just in a different environment. Sometimes we'll go up to my house and shoot up at my house, which is a completely different kind of light and a completely different kind of vibe and produces a completely different kind of photograph. And sometimes it's just, you know, everything unfortunately can become routine. One of the things that I do try and change up, and the thing that I struggle with most, is composition. It's a thing that I struggle in the sense that it's a thing that I want most to be interesting. And that's the hardest thing, I think, to get to be really interesting. Because you're continually dealing with essentially the same— going in circles. Lines, plates, food. Sometimes that to me is the biggest challenge, is to try and make compositional elements of photographs to make them interesting.

Well, you're talking about circles. Let me ask you a question. I hate square plates. Every now and then I'll try and shoot something on it, and I end up turning it on an angle to make me feel better. But if I shoot it straight on square, I just don't like it.

Well, it's boring.

That's—

that's— okay, I mean, I agree. It's, it's, uh, if you're going to shoot a square plate, um, you want to— let me see if I can find, um, if you're going to shoot a square plate, you really want to try and make something, uh, interesting with it. You want it at an angle, you want it at a at a— you want it to use the squareness of the plate to create some kind of a visual dynamic. Actually, this is a shot here is probably a good example because it does— this is a square plate, which I like because I thought it had a nice patterning to it. But I agree, I mean, it's— and that actually was what led to partly this shot being kind of difficult to compose, was that squares are very static. And, you know, and there are all kinds of shapes of plates out there, and actually some are— I really probably prefer round plates more than anything else. Yeah, there are some very unusual unusually shaped plates that we have, and we've tried shooting with them, and they are kind of a nightmare because you— it's hard to get the right angle on them, and you end up seeing the plate more than you end up seeing the food, which completely defeats the purpose because of its interesting shape or strange shape, whatever.

Exactly. Give it— yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, good. I'm glad it's not just me then.

No, I don't, I don't, you know, square plates can be, can be interesting. I mean, a perfect square or close to perfect square can be an interesting thing to shoot. You know, this is a square plate with a square cake on it, but to make it interesting, you had to add another element.

Right, and that's what you did. You put it on an oblong, which took it another step too. So it used its squareness to its advantage.

Well, again, that's echoing. You always want to echo your theme, you know, but you want to— again, it's about establishing patterns and breaking those patterns. It's the same thing. I mean, square plates can be very cool with the This works. It's a simple— the reason it works is because you have a white, plain, square plate with all this busy stuff going on, right? This cake, the top of this cake is very, very busy, and that takes away the dullness of the square, you know. But shooting them head-on is— can be, can be very difficult, very challenging.

Okay, we have a question from Simi J, and she wants to know, do you plan your shots? Do you sketch them out at all, or you just set them up as you go?

Usually share— we do, we discuss it, and we say, okay, we want to go with a, you know, a more rustic feel or more modern feel, and Cheryl goes and she sets something up, and then we kind of use that as a point of departure. So we plan them to some degree. I don't actually sketch them out. I used to, but I think just over the years I gained experience where I could kind of see all that in my head now. It's very useful to sketch things out. It's very helpful to developing a sense of composition, to sketch things out, and I don't discourage that at all. But mainly, and again, this is sort of the way I work, the shots kind of evolve. They're almost improvisational to some degree. We get the elements that we think will work well together, and we lay them out and we create a composition. And Cheryl is really good at creating just beautiful things to look at. Curiously, they don't— it's— they don't always photograph well, not because of any failure on her part, but because sometimes The camera, even to this day, fools me where I think I see something, I say, wow, that's absolutely amazing, and I just can't get something to work about it. I can't get a composition to work. So it's always an evolving process. We start with an idea, and then I, again, I get a little wary of If I end up sketching something out, then I want to stick to that, and that can be a little limiting sometimes. Okay.

Alright, if you guys have any other questions out there, now's the time to ask them. We have a few minutes left. It's been a lot of great information from Adam on composition and cropping and everything in general. Okay, I guess that's about it for tonight then. You have anything else you want to add, Adam, or—

um, no. I mean, look, it takes practice, but do what pleases you. I mean, these are all principles. They're all general rules to hopefully nudge you in the direction of creating things that make you happy. You know, make the images that work for you, and, you know, Pinterest and Foodgawker and all this other stuff will eventually come around and work for you as well. And just, you know, it does take some dedication, it does take some effort, but you know, that effort is rewarded. Just, you know, keep applying these principles and keep doing it.

Sounds good. And what you're saying is, to thine own self be true. There you go.

Thanks, Willie.

Yeah, thank you very much, Willie. All right, well, thank you, Adam. It was a great session tonight, and we are the G+ Food Bloggers community with our community education series. And if you have not heard, I want to bring it up right now. We are having a virtual food bloggers— or not food bloggers because it's just blogging— virtual bloggers conference, and that is the weekend of July 12th, 13th, and 14th. And we have a great lineup. If you stop on my blog, you can see what the lineup is, and it's still— we're still adding a few people into it, and I might have a few surprises we're working on. Trying to get a special guest, but you know how that is sometimes. But it's gonna be a great 3 days of conferencing, and we're gonna kick it off with a keynote address on Friday night and a virtual cocktail party. So bring pictures of your favorite cocktails to post into the session while we're doing that. Alright, so once again, Adam, thank you very much for tonight, and we'll see you all soon. Alright, bye-bye.