Let's Talk Photography with Adam Barnes - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight you're in a Community Education Hangout, and we're going into a photographer's studio with Adam Barnes from Picture Perfect Meals. Adam's with us in his studio, and he's going to go over some of the techniques he uses, lighting, uh, images that he takes for his blog Picture Perfect Meals. And I also have a guest in here tonight. I have Renee Dobbs. From Magnolia Days. Alright, so if you have questions, put them down in the comments, and we will try our best to answer them. And I'm going to turn it over to Adam right now. Adam, take it away.

Well, good evening. First of all, I'd like to say thanks to Chef Dennis Littley for inviting me to do this wonderful thing. Hello, Renee, and everybody else who's watching. A little bit about me. I've been a professional photographer for 30 years now, about 25 of that shooting food. I've worked with Vogue, Entertaining, Southern Living, American Profile, National Geographic Traveler. I've done ad campaigns for Alitalia, Charlie's, Jack Daniel's. So I've had some experience with this stuff. This is what I planned for us all tonight is based on certain assumptions. And the assumption is that many, if not most of you watching, are going to be food bloggers who are wanting to improve their mastery of photography to improve the images that go on there, on your websites. I'm also working under the assumption that you have generally a certain amount of photographic knowledge, maybe not a tremendous amount. And also the third assumption is that you're willing to work at what you're doing. Otherwise, you would probably be watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey or CSI or whatever else instead of being glued to your computer looking at this. The primary thing, you know, the most important tool that you have is not your camera, it's not your tripod, it's not Photoshop, it's light. The word photography comes from the Greek, and the very first half of that word is light, photo, and the other part, graphos, whatever, painting with light, drawing with light, whatever. The point is, it's about light. Lighting is what really determines 80% of the photographic aspect of what you're doing. There are other factors— there's lens choice, there's if you choose to use a selective focus or a very broad depth of field, you know, so everything is in focus. Those are other artistic and creative decisions you can make, but it all really starts with the light. And the one thing that I would caution anyone and everyone against is using the flash that's built into your camera. There's nothing that kills light or food more than that. What we look for when we are creating a food photograph is to create texture and to bring out, you know, as we'll see in a moment, what— the texture of the food, to bring out what it is that makes it look good to us. You know, sorry, I'm having a little bit of a brain freeze here, but it's also lighting to the advantage of the textures, which makes the eye move around the photo.— and the human eye is not designed to stand still. This goes back to when we were all running away from saber-toothed tigers or whatever it was we did, but the human eye is not naturally inclined to stand still, which is— I'm not a doctor, but it's probably why I come away with a headache when I've been staring at the computer all day. And part of lighting and composition in these things is to get the eye moving around your picture. And ultimately, it's to make it pretty and to make it appealing. It matters if you're a blogger. One of the things, one of the first things, no matter how gifted a writer or cook you may be, the first thing that people are seeing is the photo. And whether it's on FoodGawker or whether it's on Tastebotting or Google+ or Facebook or Twitter, that photo is the first contact that they have with you and your blog, and it does take some work. What I propose to do here now is to show you some basic fundamental lighting ideas and how you can use what are really household items to manipulate that light, because photography is really about the manipulation of light. What we have right now— Chef, if you want to go to the camera 2 here. Chef, can you hear me?

Yes, I got you, Adam. We're on there.

All right. Okay. What we have here is a box of chocolates. With it being Valentine's Day, I thought it would be topical. And we just happened to finish shooting this. Looking at it as it's appearing on your screen, I hope, at this point, you see what it pretty much looks like sitting in your kitchen, or maybe in your living room, or on the counter somewhere. Okay. I mean, it looks nice. You see it's colorful. You're getting some reflections in places. You know, that maybe you don't want. You're getting a little glare down through here off the foil, but I mean, that's what it kind of looks like on your kitchen counter. So now, this is what it's going to look like by window light, and suddenly everything has changed here.

Now, I will caution you, Adam, we just lost that camera again. Sorry folks, we're just having a little issue with that one camera. Adam's going to hook it back up and we will be back in business in just a minute. What he is showing you though is how you can use some objects you have around the house to change the lighting. We did go through this previously. Adam, you're back. And you're going to have to unmute that microphone, Adam. No, we lost it again. Bear with us, please, and we will get to that. There we go.

Okay, hopefully I can hear this time. All right. Yep.

It's not gonna be cooperating with us tonight.

Okay, are you with me, guys?

We're with you. All right, all right, all right, forward while we got it.

Okay, all right, so what you notice now, okay,— is now you have very distinctly defined areas of light and of shadow. Okay, and now what you're seeing is the light and shadow is defining the nuts on these truffles, it's defining these little bits of crystallized sugar. Okay, it's defining these— this— I don't know what you would call that. What do you call that, Chef, when you Drizzle? Drizzle, yeah.

Very much. Layman's term.

It's defining this drizzle, okay? Because what defines what we see is light and dark. So all of a sudden, if you want to go back for comparison, all right, this is what you started with, okay? And this is where you're going now. As soon as the camera adjusts. What I was saying was that the camera— this camera does not have the exposure control, and so— and this is something that's important to remember when you're shooting. Cameras have meters, and you point your camera at a subject. If the subject has large dark areas, your picture is not going to come out properly exposed. It's going to come out too light. And if the subject has very strong bright areas in it, your picture's gonna come out too dark. Okay, so what you need to use, if your camera has it, is called exposure compensation. You need to adjust for it. This, for right now, looks workable. It looks okay. So we have a much more attractive looking light here. Now one of the things— our eyes look at things and they compensate for the difference between light and dark. The camera does not, and you can actually see here, up here where this is almost gone to black on this black side of this, on the dark side of this chocolate, which is brown. And Renee, I believe you asked a question about shooting brown food, did you not?

Oh, absolutely.

Alright, well, there's a couple things we can do. This is starting to touch on it. Okay, so what we need to do— we need to do two things here because we have, in my estimation, two big problems here to get a nice balanced photograph of this pretty box of chocolates. One is that this area over here is very, very, very bright, okay? And that is going to distract your viewer, okay? And this area over here is going to be too dark. As is the backside of these dark chocolates. Okay, and the other thing that we have here that I don't like, and this has to do again with leading the eye around the image, is that in this particular case where you have very strong graphic patterns, you want to have things that match up to those patterns. Previously, this pink heart was down, you know, at the 6 o'clock position. And that would drag your eye there and lock it there, because when you have patterns, you need— things that are inconsistent draw attention to themselves. So that's a decision you have to make. It's cool to do something different to draw attention to it, but I mean, for example, you could take one of these truffles and take a bite out of it and put it back, or just leave the empty holder.— and that breaks up the pattern in a different kind of way that tells a little bit of a story, but we'll get to that later. We're talking about dealing with the difficulties of lighting. Okay. The first thing we're going to deal with is this highlight area over here, okay, because we don't want that. We want to take that down. We are going to use a book, whatever screen this is seen on, just a regular household book. This one happens to be a gourmet's book of herbs and spices. Okay, but it's in good shape and— whoops. Well, you can still hear me even though that one seems to have gone off, right, Chef?

Yes, sir, we got you.

Okay. I'll get to that in a second. And a common A-clamp, which you can get at Home Depot or wherever for about $2. All right.

So—

I'm gonna have to do this this way. So what we're going to do with this area over here is we're gonna start by creating— by just bringing in a shadow. And you just— you can see how dense or how light you want that shadow, and you can see how much of it you want in there. And right now we'll just bring in a little bit of shadow, and all of a sudden this whole thing has balanced out, and your eye is no longer fighting this— the bright area. You know, suddenly you're dragged all the way over there again. If you bring this back in, your eye is no longer fighting it. Now you have to be careful. I mean, for my money, right now there's a very dense shadow all the way to the edge of the frame. Alright, for my money, I don't like that. So you need to, you know, exercise some judgment as to how much— you may want to leave a little bit of light, or you may just want to bring the shadow in so it's more even throughout. And now your chocolates are popping out a lot more. You have refocused your viewer's attention because remember, you're manipulating light, but you're also, to some extent, manipulating what your viewer is seeing. You're trying to direct what you do to— you're trying to direct your viewer's eye to what you want them to see. And you don't want them to see the blown-out pink tablecloth. You want them to see the chocolates. Okay? Now, photography is a subjective thing. It is an entirely personal set of judgments. There are certain general rules. Some people like very dense shadows. And you could make this photograph in such a way where you left very dense shadows, and if that pleases you, then that's cool. The reason for a lot of the rules surrounding what you do with lighting in photography is because what the camera can read versus what printed paper can read are two completely different things. The camera, especially if you have cameras with, you know, very sensitive digital— the sensors are very high-end sensors. I mean, they read an enormous amount of information, most of which will never get to the page, and so you have— or your computer screen. So you have to take that into consideration. So, but more—

uh-oh. We lost him altogether.

We lost both of them.

Alright, well, he'll be back shortly. Hang in there, everybody. So far, he's shown us really a lot about light and how to use it and how it really affects what you're seeing. I know what he was saying about how the eye gets distracted by that bright spot. I think a lot of times we tend to get some spots in our images that are kind of blown out— and we don't realize how much of an impact that really has on what we're seeing and how the eye gets drawn to that. The fact that he said the eyes continue to move the whole time you're looking at something, you think about it and it's right. It's not something that we normally would think about, but your eyes are constantly looking and moving around at the subject trying to draw in. And how something is set up is how your eyes are going to move. So you want to try and set it up so it's pleasing, just like he moved that heart a little bit so your eyes aren't keeping— to be drawn down into that. So that's something to think about.

It's amazing the little details that go into it. You know, you miss something and then you look at your picture when you're post-processing and you think, oh, I can see that right away, that's got to go.

And then you just move forward.

Hi, Adam. Yeah, we got this one back. Can you get your other camera up to you? Thank you.

That's what I'm looking for. Where did you all lose me? What was I saying?

You were at— you were talking about light and changing it on this when we lost you. But I think for them to see how you're going to be making your adjustments, we should have your other camera too, if you can.

Yeah.

Is that camera not up?

No.

We have the one over the candy. That's it.

Yeah, okay.

All right, I'm coming.

Mm-hmm.

But I mean, but you can see from this the big difference that— and you can't see where he placed the book, and we did go over this before, so I know what he was doing. I will go over it again.

—here in just a second.

But by placing the book, you brought the shadow into that spot, so your eyes now are really drawn to that box of chocolates more than being distracted by that spot. And you can pick out all the texture and all the detail in it. And again, you guys got to remember too that these cameras are webcams, and they just don't have the They don't have enough to really show you a lot of detail. So this is really pretty good for a webcam to show this much detail and to see the differences.

Chef, I'm having trouble getting there.

Okay.

I'm having trouble getting to the event here.

If you go to my profile page, you may be able to get in that way.

Okay, because— there we go. Okay, I don't know what's up with these webcams, but this is not even a webcam. This is the—

well, what's the— You got the extra microphone now too. With Google+ and Hangouts, anything that can happen will happen. That's just kind of like the days of live television. It's the same thing. Okay, you were talking about how the eye captures what the camera captures and what the screen captures.

Okay. That's why we need to fill in and compensate for extremely highlighted areas and extremely dark areas. Okay, so we went over— put it— we went over using a book to create a shadow, right, to balance the whole photo out. Yeah. Okay, we got that. So now we have a much more balanced photo. And yeah, up on the screen it actually looks pretty nice. Did you all hear what I was saying about the subjectivity of all of this? Yeah. Yes, we did. This is a personal decision, a lot of this. Okay. As to how much shadow you do and don't leave, and except for when you're dealing with print issues. Alright, now we're gonna deal with the shadow side of this. Alright, and because we don't want to get an excess of, um, of shadow there, we're going to bring in I don't know if you could show this, Chef, from where you are, if the other camera's working. Yep. We are going to bring in a white card. This is just a simple piece of foam core, okay? A big one like this is about $4, $3.50 or something at Walmart. You know, you can get big expensive ones from photo stores, but you really don't need to. It's just a lot of money for something that does exactly the same thing. Okay, now we're addressing the shadow side of this, which is here. All right, and also the backside of these chocolates. Okay, and I know that, or it seems that these cameras are on a slight delay, but just watch the density of the shadow as this thing moves in. You see it start to open up? It starts to get a little bit lighter. Take this out. Bring it back in again. Okay, and again here, you can go as great or as little as you want. Alright? And now what you've done is you have created a highlight, although you don't see it really well on this webcam, but you have created a highlight on the dark side of this brown chocolate. Okay, and that is now separating it and giving some definition to the shape. And this is a very simple method of lighting. Okay, it's lateral lighting. Light is directional. Okay, we have one sun. Light always moves from right to left, north to south. East to west, but it's always moving in a direction. That's why when you get things, although it was very, you know, if you look at like those film noir things, those old Humphrey Bogart movies from back in the day, where they had all kind of lights coming in from all, or Fred Astaire movies are probably a better example, where they have all kind of lights coming in from all kind of different angles. It's a very artificial looking scenario. It's effective for what they were doing. But the fundamental principle that there is— light is directional. There's one sun, and it almost always moves directionally. Which brings me to something of a technical point. Chef, if you want to turn on the other camera here.

I have that one on. You want the— The wide view? Yeah, we're talking to you. We got you.

Okay. This is a light bank. This particular light bank is attached to a flash head. That really doesn't matter. My point about this light bank, okay, if you can see, which I hope you can, is that it looks an awful lot like a window. And this is the point. It's easy to get hung up in the idea, okay, that equipment is what is necessary to do what you do. It's always nice to be able to have equipment, particularly if your interests run that way, but equipment is big, it's expensive, and generally speaking, unless you're extremely committed, you're generally not gonna make that kind of investment. My point in showing you this is that even though we are in a studio right now with all this equipment, the principle here is that of window light. If you have a window in your bedroom, living room, kitchen, laundry room, all these same principles apply. And you need to observe— you need to observe how light moves around things. If you change the position of this light to here, you have a different photograph. You have a completely differently lit box of chocolates. Is it better? Is it worse? It's purely subjective. This is— this because the light is closer on top of it now, so for all— for practical purposes, I have essentially moved this box closer to the window. Even though in this case I moved the light closer to the box. I have, in essence, moved this box closer to the window, and what that has achieved is created a much more even light. The shadows have moved from, you know, starting just a little beyond halfway to now they've moved much further along, so much more of the roundness of these things is is illuminated. And again, the same principle would apply here. If, you know, you don't— you want— it's a little too hot up there, you bring your book, which is serving as a scrim, around to there. And if you want to fill your light in a little bit at this end, you bring your white card down, and then again you deal with the same levels of balance. And again, it's all subjective. You know, you can see as I move the white card in and out, you see much more what its effect is. Now, as far as the issues of brown, a lot of foods are brown. Casseroles are brown, steak is brown, A lot of pancakes are brown, a lot of these issues. Apart from the lighting issues that you need to do, okay, to make sure that your browns don't block up in your shadows, is that you need to use color. Did you— I mean, Renee, was there a specific dish that brought to mind your question?

Well, it's just that I was wondering if it's best to use solid colors or patterns of colors, a spot of color, white plates, I mean, just anything that would help with, you know, brown foods overall. Is it better to have just a splash of color or a lot of different colors or —Or what?

If you have a stew, for example, okay, a beef stew of some kind, right? Well, most stews have, um, have vegetables. They have celery frequently, carrots, peas. What you do, and this gets into food styling as well, But you make those things prominent. You need to get in there with a little spoon, a little fork or something, and pick those things out and make them prominent in the overall surface of your plate.

Yes, there's a lot of baked goods, though. Think of a cinnamon bread or something like that where it's just one big hunk of brown and cut it.

Yeah, slice it. This will serve two purposes for you. One, it will show you the inside of the bread, which is really the business end of it. And two, it will give you variety. In the case of like a cinnamon, cinnamon bread or something like that, The outside is that crusty brown. Now again, you can do great things with crusty brown bread. Okay, you— I wish I could upload photos to this because I have photos.

I've done some photos of brown bread and all. It's just, you know, the slice itself is just— you know, you think of a whole wheat bread It's brown on the outside, it's brown on the inside. And so do you put it on a colorful plate or put it on a white plate with a colorful napkin?

You can do that, but you have to be careful because if you're using a very bright color, okay, and if you refer back to— back to the chocolates on our screen, okay, let's do a quick little exercise. If those chocolates are on your screen, just close your eyes and open them again and see where your eye goes first. What's the first thing you see?

That little pink heart on that dark chocolate one?

Right, exactly. It is a bright spot. It is a bright color. So you run a risk if you have whole wheat bread, for example, or pumpkin bread, or, you know, banana bread. You run a risk of actually losing your bread if you put it on, say, a bright red or a bright yellow plate, because the eye is always drawn to the brightest point. Okay, and so again, that's why you position things. Things have patterns. If you look— and again, this goes back to what I was saying about your vegetables in your stew, for example. If you look at these chocolates, okay, there are patterns. There's a triangular pattern, okay.— and then there's another triangular pattern, okay? And then there's a Z pattern, all right? All of these things serve to lead the eye around and to keep it moving around. And the problem when you have a monochromatic image, one that's all brown, or a subject that's all brown, and what you experience as dissatisfaction is that your eye gets stuck. And you don't— it doesn't go anywhere and you don't see anything. And, you know, we experience that as, I don't like this, it's not working for me for some reason. But then we go back to lighting, because if you use an angular light, all right, which by angular I mean not overhead, if you just put it on your kitchen counters and turn on the fluorescents your— or you use your little on-camera flash, all right, you are flattening the whole thing out. And so what makes it distinctive and interesting? Because in point of fact, a loaf of banana bread, for example, or whole wheat bread, is not one color of brown. There may be a couple of hundred shades of brown in there. When you start angling your light, okay, and using what it's— what in photographic terms is called modeling, okay, the ratio of light to dark around these chocolates, okay, the movement of light to shadow is called modeling. And if you use those principles when you're photographing your loaf of bread, what you're going to do is create interest by highlighting the texture, all right? Because all bread, even if you don't cut it, okay? I mean, if you— in my mind's eye, I can see something where you're pretty close on a loaf of bread and you have very angular light.— and it is— you will see all the little bumps, all the little rises and falls, because it doesn't come out smooth like this piece of paper here. And you see all the variation of color. But what you need to get away from is just doing big, flat, open light. This is where I talk about the manipulation of light. You have to manipulate your light in a way to serve the subject. And with food, texture is the name of the game because that is part of— on our subliminal level, okay, that's what we want to eat. You know, it's part of what makes it look good. Yeah. Is that— look at that pie. Well, you know, what is it about the flakiness of that pie crust?

Are there any colors to avoid?

Blue and food generally don't go that well, as a rule. Now, unless you're doing something that's like sort of tropically themed, something with mangoes. You're doing mahi-mahi with like a mango pineapple chutney or something. Blue would go very well there, but because brown and blue in the color spectrum are never very happy partners, most foods which do have a lot of brown in them, okay, do not go so well with blue. But you have to think, you have to exercise some judgment as to whether the bright color complements your food or not. Red and orange go— they go very well together, but you may not want to make a photograph of, say, a sliced orange on a red plate because it may just be too intense. You want something that would support it but not compete with it. Okay? And going back to a loaf of bread, a muffin, use napkin, use a napkin with a pattern. For example, if you're doing a muffin, all right, just a muffin, a blueberry muffin. Well, maybe you want to use a pattern that say, a napkin that might have some kind of say polka dot pattern on it. Alright, because that picks up on the circular idea of the muffin. Ah. But it provides a visual break. It gives you something else visually that can bring you back. So your eye goes to the muffin, and it goes to the napkin, and it goes back to the muffin. And the idea is to keep the eye moving, but moving in patterns that will bring it back. And when you can echo something, like the polka dots being sort of an echo of the circle of a muffin, okay, it's just— it, it just— it keeps the eye interested. And when the eye is interested, the subconscious says, wow, that looks good. And I think that if you go back after we've talked tonight and you look at, you know, the images that have been sort of frustrating you or troubling you, you will find that a lot of these, the problems, if you go back and retake the photograph applying some of the things that we're talking about here, and looking at the light not as just something that illuminates it, but that as something that can enhance it and play with it a little bit, and then take the photograph again and see how you feel about it.

Yeah. How do you deal with the light on, say, black backgrounds? I see occasionally food photos that have— that's on a black tabletop or a slate tabletop or a black background, and it seems like just that one thing is highlighted. How do you deal with lighting black surfaces?

Well, I mean, there— you— in a way, you don't. In a way, actually, the trick of black surfaces— I mean, again, depending upon what your objective is, but if you want to create that sense of something almost floating on black. Is that the kind of thing you're describing?

In a way, yes. Or it kind of sets a nighttime mood or something like that. I've seen some that, you know, just really look very interesting because that one thing is just highlighted so much because it's on that black background. I know black is difficult.

Well, that's a great way to— oh, thank you. That is a great way to highlight things, and it doesn't necessarily always have to just be black. You can— but when you have something stand out against a dark background, okay, and that could be blue, or it could just be shadow, or it could be black. I mean, a black tablecloth with You know, I mean, what you're bringing to my mind is sort of an elegant, you know, sort of an elegant evening for two kind of thing in an elegant restaurant. And it does serve very well to highlight, particularly if the food has color. Now, for example, if you had a black tablecloth and, you know, gold linens or white and gold linens and, you know, stem glasses, and you had, um, well, if you had a piece of banana bread on there, it wouldn't be as effective. You would actually have to work— you would have to bring in some kind of whipped cream, and you'd have to bring in something to highlight it. Now, but if you had some kind of, you know, strawberries dipped in chocolate, the brightness of the red would really jump out from the black. Yeah. So black, really what it does is it does enhance the brightness of colors, and it is a very effective way to highlight certain kinds of things. Again, it's up to you to determine what you feel is most appropriate in what it is that you're trying to express. Yeah. Because food is an idea. When you make a photograph of food, It's really, it's an idea that you're expressing. This is your idea of, you know, of a banana bread or of a pumpkin bread or of a cake. It's your idea of it, you know. And it's food to my— now, again, this is very subjective, as I've said before. My favorite photographs, either that I view or that I create are photographs that are evocative in some sense. They're evocative of a time and place. Okay, they give a sense of grandmother's kitchen or, you know, café on the Via Veneto or, you know, a picnic at the beach or, you know, they— food is so intricately wrapped up with our lives. You know, we feed our families, we share, you know, wonderful times and events with friends over what? Over dinner, at a barbecue, at a picnic at the beach, you know, neighborhood lunches, whatever. But I mean, food is so intricately tied up with our emotional experience of life. And for me and my particular philosophy of photography, the most successful photos, that is to say the ones that I best connect with, are photos that are evocative on some level and sort of tell a bit of a story on some level. You know, this box of chocolates, we're not really telling a story here because we're trying to talk about some technical things. But if you were to take this, it's on sort of a pink background, okay? You could drop some rose petals around it. You could bring some ribbon. You could, you know, tie two wedding rings together and, you know, place them in there in some attractive way, where suddenly this thing which looks okay— I mean, you know, you kind of like to reach in there and have a chocolate— but then that suddenly becomes something more evocative. And propping is really a whole other discussion, but it's part of you know, telling the story. And the difference, I think, between photographs that people relate to and photographs that they gloss over is that component that draws them in. And whether that's a storytelling component or whether that's a very artistic graphic component, because I mean, there is a graphic element to this. If you— we'll actually, I think, post this tomorrow. Yes. If you want to go to our website and look, I don't know, it'll probably be after late morning Eastern time, and look at the post of the box of chocolates, you'll see that what we did. And the one thing that is frustrating to me, that I cannot show you is what happens inside the camera and what the lens views, which is the other part of this equation. But until there's a lot of advances made in webcams, or at least webcams that work with Mac computers, then I'm a little limited in that regard. But I mean, it would give you an idea of, you know, my particular vision of this thing, my particular interpretation of this box of chocolates. You know, um, sounds good. So where we at?

I feel like I've been talking for a long time. No, you've touched on a lot of very important aspects of taking an image, Adam. I think you've given us a perspective that maybe some of us haven't thought of at all. You know, it's really more telling a story is gonna get more out of that subject than you could have imagined, rather than just throwing it on a plate, propping it up by the window, and taking a quick shot. I mean, taking a few minutes to think about what it might mean to you in another sense is really going to make a difference on a great shot and just a kind of an average shot. That's a lot of good information there. I think we can take some questions now, though. We did have some posed, and one that actually just went up was, uh, Samantha Ferrero was asking about action shots and what do you do to stage those, like pouring something into a— onto, like, I guess syrup onto pancakes or pouring milk into a glass or just pouring something.

Okay, first and foremost, it's good to have an extra pair of hands. Okay, so get somebody to help you because you're really making it a lot harder if you're doing it yourself. The big secret to pours is having a fast enough shutter speed so that you don't have kind of an amorphous blur of liquid coming down on top of your pancakes, say, for this, or if, you know, being pouring out of a ladle into a bowl. The really the best way to achieve that is with a high shutter speed of probably 1/25th of a second or better. And really, the best way to achieve it is with a serious flash unit. And by that, I do not mean the little flash that pops up on your camera. Okay, disable that sucker if you can, because it's the kiss of death to any food photograph. I said it earlier, I'm saying it again. If you have, you know, those flash units that you take on and off, a lot of people have these where, you know, use like a shoot-through umbrella. A lot of people get these translucent umbrellas. They come— I know you can get these photo kits on Amazon and stuff like that. That's a great way to do it because the trick is that you want a burst of light. Okay, that is fast enough, um, that will capture and freeze that action. And that's really what you want. And the best way to achieve that is with, um, studio lighting. I don't know if you can see this set, but I'm actually going to fire this flash That was 1/750th of a second. And that is, in essence, portable sunlight. That may not seem like a lot of time, but when you're dealing with flash, time is irrelevant because it is the duration of the actual burst that burns effectively the image onto the sensor, or what used to be film, but onto the sensor. So that's really the best way to do it. Otherwise, if you're outside, you could do it, but you get into issues of ISO ratings, which can give you a lot of noise unless you have some of these really, really high-end Canons, particularly Canon cameras. Not that others aren't great too. When you get it at very high ISO ratings, really anything above 400, you start to run the risk of noise. Which used to be, back in the field days, was called grain.

Okay.

I'm sorry, I'm being told something. What? Oh yeah, my wife is telling me something very good, and this goes to two things. Tripods. Tripods are not useful just for not getting camera shake. Tripods are a very important tool in maintaining the composition of your photograph. And what my wife just told me was, you make sure you frame up the shot before you do the pour. Okay, and make sure that you know where the pour is going to go, because otherwise— and I know this from personal direct experience— it will be very frustrating ultimately kind of expensive to have to be remaking the pancakes or whatever it is that you're doing to make sure that you get that perfect pour.

I hope that was helpful. Yep, that absolutely makes sense. Okay, we had a question from Liz Clements too, and she wanted to know, she says, you know, when you're limited in space, let's say you just had a kitchen countertop or something to work on. If you have a small space, is there a best way to set up for shooting?

You know, having a small space is not a bad thing, especially, um, especially if you have reasonably good light. Okay, food almost always looks good when you're tight on it. Okay, if you can get your plate or your box of chocolates or, you know, the subject of your photo to fill the better part of your— uh-oh.

That's all right. If you can just get the other one back. We've done so well. We were getting lucky there for a while not having an issue with that camera. Here it comes back though. There we go.

I think I'm back. You're back. I think I'm back. And we lost the other one. That's not so important right now. What was I saying? I was talking last time— about filling a frame. Yeah, if you get— If you can get the food to fill the better part of your frame, what you're doing is showing off the delicious scallions and the emulsification of the vinaigrette if you're shooting a salad, you know, the fresh herbs in the vinaigrette. You can do that. And again, if you're applying some of the principles of lighting that we've talked about here, which is create a sense of light and shadow throughout your food because that that will enhance what you're doing. And, you know, in a small space you can do that fairly easily. Even one of my personal favorite things to do— and it takes some skill and some practice— but is actually almost backlighting food, lighting it from behind relative to the camera, relative to me. And then I bounce some light up with a reflector.— and it always yields this really nice kind of flow of light, and it feels very natural. And you can do that in a small kitchen, in a small room where you don't have a lot of space to move around. As I pointed out earlier, you can manipulate light to some degree with just household items. You know, if you have a shadow— if you want to create a shadow, I think I can show you how to do this. This food camera is still on, right? Yes. Okay. Um, I think this will work. All right, let's just pretend here for a second that I don't like the way this looks here. All right, that's too bright. I have a bottle which you can't probably see. It's an olive oil dispenser. It's just like a bottle, okay, to dispense olive oil. See, there it is, just a regular old bottle. Okay? Well, you can bring something like that in, well, okay, and it's a subtle change, but you can see all of a sudden this area has gotten a little bit darker. Okay? Now, yeah, this webcam doesn't show it great, but it is showing it. My point is that even with a small counter and a small area, okay, you can, you can light and photograph very effectively by using a little imagination and, you know, some of these principles we've talked about, and just some common sense. So I would not see that as a liability. The one thing I will caution you about, though,— and this gets into lenses and optics— is the tendency to use the wide lens— the wide spectrum of a lens. Most— probably most of us are shooting with some kind of zoom lens, all right? It either came in a camera kit or it's affixed to the camera. As in like a point-and-shoot type of thing, you get what is in effect a distortion. And I'm actually going to show you what it looks like here.

Um, alright.

Apart from the fact that it's at an angle, do you see how this front is kind of pulling out toward you a little bit? It's kind of— it's called keystoning, but it distorts. That's because this is a wide-angle lens. What you want to shoot, even in a small kitchen, is with the longer ends of your lens. By that I mean at least 70mm or better. Okay, because otherwise you will get into lens distortions that make things look like they're bowing out into your face kind of thing.

Okay? Yep. Okay, makes sense.

Alright, ask me another question. I'm gonna see if I can get this other computer running.

Yeah, okay, we had a question about using light and Sandra Hoops just wanted to know, she goes she doesn't have lighting equipment right now and she uses window sunlight, and how does she counter the gray light of winter? I mean, when all you've got is this ugly winter sunlight, if you've got any blue skies at all, you're lucky. I know I get that a lot here in New Jersey, is just you can't shoot.

What do you do? Believe it or not, that gray open flat light, okay, can actually be quite an advantage, because particularly when you're dealing with window light, sunlight can create enormous problems of contrast. That being said, and you know, that was my optimistic take on the situation. It's difficult, you're right, because light of that nature tends to be very blue. Now, if you know your way around Photoshop a little bit, or whatever your imaging program is— It's 9 o'clock. You can go into your imaging program and correct the color balance. You can go in— one of the things that you lose in light like that is contrast. So you can go in and, I mean, look, honestly, I'm familiar with Photoshop and really none other, but all imaging programs are going to have the same basic tools, and those tools include ways to adjust your contrast— which is really the ratio between light and dark— ways to— in Photoshop there's curves, which basically lifts the middle tones, and you can adjust your color balance. What you want to add when you have a lot of blue in the light, like you're describing, is you want to add some red and some yellow. The other thing that you can do if you use, like, a DSLR style of camera, you know, with with the detachable lens and all that, is you can get a warming filter. They're sort of amber in color and they take a little— you know, they're designed— they were originally designed back in the days of film to improve skin tones. And, you know, they have that kind of golden California healthy glow to the models back in the day.— but they're very useful for shooting food. And I know in the studio, guys, you know, shooting with studio strobes a lot of times will use amber gels, you know, amber-colored pieces of plastic, basically, over their lights to create a similar effect. Those are things you can do. I would— I know that, you know, during the winter you get stuck with that. I would try and open up my images a little bit by keeping the shadows from getting too dense, again, using the same kind of principles we discussed today. And also, you know, go into your photo program and play with warming it up and play with punching up the contrast, and I think that'll help you a lot.

Okay. Kim Balu wanted to know if you could use mirrors to help reflect light.

I love using mirrors, and you can use— mirrors are fun— and you can use— and here's another household item, okay? A lot of you ladies have compacts in your purses. Yeah, you can use mirrors all the time, and they're fun. I don't actually use them. My way of doing things has changed over the years, but I used to use them all the time, and you can do very cool things with mirrors. What you need is you just need to get it at the right angle. And if you go back to this, you know, I mean, you could use mirrors to highlight— this is quite a big gold mirror that I have here. But you can use mirrors to highlight, you know, different angles, to highlight very limited areas, depending— you could tape a mirror off. Mirrors are a lot of fun, and you know, if you just want— this mirror is quite big for what I'm trying to describe, but if you just want to highlight, for example, just this little chocolate here, okay? And this is a cool thing you can do with mirrors. You know, you— it's taking some positioning, but you know, you bring it around just to the point where it's giving you what it is that you want. And the smaller the mirror, obviously, the more, um, the more precise you can be and the more you can target it. Now, this brings up another thing. Bear with me because I'm going to make a change here. Just keep your eyes on this, uh, box of chocolates. This is a 1000-watt spotlight, and you use it to simulate things like sunlight. Okay? Ignore the highlight areas. This is going to get a little tricky. I want you to concentrate really on just looking at the food. Okay? And again, we have a whole different texture argument here. But I think probably all of us have been sitting in a restaurant or a bar or someplace at 7:30 on a summer's evening, and this is the kind of light you see on a sunny evening, you know, down by the beach or whatever. —this is the kind of light you see. It's called specular light, okay? It's very hard light, like direct sunlight. Going back to, you know, when the gray clouds have left you in New Jersey, all right, and you're back into the summertime, this creates another whole host of problems. You have, okay, very, very, very strong light, so you end up with very, very wherever they are, very strong highlights. There's a couple of ways you can deal with this. One is you bring in enough reflector, okay? And this is actually a good example of how you can use a mirror, which is what I really set this up for, to kind of isolate different areas of it. Now, mirrors are much more effective, okay, when you have a very hard light source like this. With a soft light source like just a big, flat, open window that doesn't have direct sunlight coming through it, they're not quite as effective because mirrors just look better when they're bouncing back, um, a hard light, and they're easier to control that way. Okay, and as you can see, you can kind of isolate any area. That's really— it's kind of— I mean, it's just kind of fun to do, and it's a fun way to play with it. You know, if I had actually— well, it's good to have a gold mirror because it shows a different— see here, you're just isolating little areas of it. You don't have to light the whole thing. Anyways, Now I totally lost my point. I'm sorry. That's okay.

We were talking about the differences in light.

We do have a few other questions. Go ahead. Let me go back. One of the dangers of shooting in sunlight, okay, one of the dangers is what you see exactly in front of you. If you're in direct sunlight, is that you get these extremes of contrast. There are ways to deal with it, but what you end up with, frankly, is very much what looks again like a, you know, like light from a window. You can put up a screen, and people do it all the time. You particularly see this like on movie sets and stuff like that where they have these huge massive— they're like parachute, and I think that's the material. Big silk screens, and it diffuses the light. But then we're back to, you know, the studio light bank or the window concept. We're all pretty much back at that same point again.

Okay. All right, Adam, we have a question from Lisa Taylor, and she's asking about, you know, for those that don't have natural light or who can't shoot until the middle of the night, She uses Lowell Ego Lights, and she's tried everything, but she still gets 1D or cartoon-like photos. Do you have any tips for that? She gets what kind of photos? Say again? Like one-dimensional, or she can't get enough out of it using like an Ego Light. Is there anything she can do? You know the Lowell Egos, the tabletop lights that so many of us use? Just to combat that, she doesn't have— There's a good amount of power in them, but they're kind of stationary if you've never seen them. The little Egos, you can put them on a little tripod, but there's two CFL bulbs in them, so you get a good amount of light from it, but it just kind of makes everything look a little flat. Is there anything you can do to combat that?

Well, again, not actually being able to actually see what it is she's referring to, because cartoonish can mean a lot of different things. Again, part of what you can do to combat it is to go back into your Photoshop or your imaging program and boost the contrast. And again, those are the things that are like little light banks, right?

Yeah, yeah, they're small, they're table type.

They shouldn't— I mean, would it make a difference if they were, say, shifted to one side and then had a reflector so that it looked like, you know, sunlight or something coming in from one side and instead of all directions? Is that what could be making it flat? There's like no shadow at all?

Yeah, I'm not really sure, Lisa, what you mean about that. Maybe if you give us a little bit more on that, we could answer you a little better.

I'm sorry, I got knocked off again. That's okay. I was saying there shouldn't be a problem with that type of a light bank except that, I mean, it might give you a little bit more contrasty light. But from what I understand of that question is that if they're very flat, meaning they don't have a lot of— I would go in and again, I would, A, make sure my exposure was correct. All right? I'd make sure that the image was properly exposed, that it wasn't too dark or too light. I would— it may be, and I don't know what kind of camera we're discussing here, that you need to go, and it may be that you need to correct your camera's exposure through exposure compensation. Sometimes you have to do that. That may be another source of the problem. It sounds like they're muddy, and if that's the case, look at the correct exposure, maybe open up your camera in the exposure compensation. Do like a +1 exposure compensation and then go into your imaging program and mess with the contrast and play around with the contrast. I think it may be— it sounds like it may be that the camera exposure is getting misled and coming out underexposed. If they're coming out flat and muddy— I know I added the word muddy, but just off the top of my head, not seeing it, I think that may have something to do with it.

Okay, sounds good. All right, we did have another question too from— I'm gonna try and pronounce this— Lukei Komo senkasa, uh, how do I set up a hair light so I can highlight my plate when using a dark backdrop? I only have a speed light.

You would need two speed lights, but you really wouldn't want to use a second speed light, um, because Well, in any event, you would need a secondary light. Now, one thing you might want to look into that would be cool is, for example, Lowell, which is a light manufacturer, makes like a little 200-watt— it's like a little spotlight that would serve two purposes. It would give you the hair light, and then you would put that on a stand— okay, and then adjust it so it was hitting where you wanted it to hit. And then you would also— obviously you would have to meter for that separately than from your speedlight. But that would do two things. It would give you your hair light, and it would also, when you wanted it, give you a little bit of warming, because tungsten light— this gets into white balance and color temperature. Lights have different temperatures. They're measured in degrees Kelvin. Daylight is 5,600 degrees Kelvin. That's considered sort of neutral-ish. All right? Evening light, like when the sun goes down, is very blue. Early morning light, when that beautiful red sun is rising, is very red. Light runs from the infrared spectrum to the ultraviolet spectrum. Tungsten light, which is what a hot light is, those little low lights, a little spotlight like that, a halogen tungsten light is roughly 3,200-3,600 degrees Kelvin, which means there's much more red in it. So by using a tungsten light in combination with your speedlight to light— you know, as your key light, your primary light, you'll also get a nice rim of warmth around it, which can be very pretty. In fact, I used to know a photographer in Nashville who used to shoot hams, and that's exactly how he would do it. Instead of filtering his lights or his camera, he would get like a pin light up above it and just kind of wash everything very lightly with with a little bit of tungsten light. But that would be the best way. And when you don't want the warmth of tungsten light, you can get what are called dichroic filters. Now, and these things aren't particularly expensive, but to do that effectively, you would need something like that because it's the only way you could restrict the light in a manner to get a hair-like kind of effect.

Okay. Kim Baloo has another question. She bought a reflector with different colors— white, gray, black, and gold. Which one would be best to use if she has a harsh light?

White. White? Okay. Yeah, because if you get— well, I mean, the gold could be an interesting effect, but you really want to kind of stick with the white if you have extreme like the light we had here a few minutes ago. If you have extremely harsh light, because you'll start to wreak havoc with your camera's exposure meter is what'll happen, which you're already well on the way to doing. Whenever you have harsh light, your camera's already going to be working overtime to try and figure it out. And, well, you should be working overtime to figure it out too, but that's— a different discussion. I would go with the white, you know, unless you wanted to make that, like, gold or silver, the reflected light the primary light source. Okay, then, you know, with the main light coming off the food, with light reflected from the silver or gold panel, that might be kind of cool, then I might use that. But if I was using it for a fill, No, just to balance the whole light, stick with the white.

Okay. All right, we had some questions that were posted previously on the board before we started tonight, and one of them was from Nadia Chu, and she wanted to know about when you're shooting in-process photos, like when you're cooking. Our kitchen's small, very little counter space, but it's flooded with natural light. How do you make the best out of that kind of a situation when you're doing your in-process photos?

Well, I mean, you know, all the tools are there. If you have great natural light, I mean, that's half the battle, you know. In-process photos, honestly, are a drag. I don't like doing them either, as Cheryl, I'm sure, will happily tell you. And it's hard to make them artistic.— and in fact, you really are not pushing to make them artistic because it's information. It's just documenting a step in a process. I mean, to make them attractive, I would, again, use similar kind of lighting principles. If your step is using your mixer, okay, and you pull your mixer up and there's all the dough or whatever on the paddle thing, You know, okay, so your light's over, you know, your window's over to your left, all right? And that's where all your light's coming from, so maybe adjust your mixer a little bit so you get the light, again, modeling around the paddle with the dough on it, okay? And then just get in there and make your photo. Bring in a reflector to balance it out so that it looks like what you think looks nice and click your photo. I mean, it's— I think the challenge of doing in-process photos, what I think so often makes them look kind of like blah, is that they are essentially blah. I mean, you're just documenting steps in a process. And they're always— I'll be honest, with the studio and all this lighting stuff at my disposal, they're very challenging for me because they're kind of boring, I guess. And I have a hard time getting past that. I'm sorry, what?

They need to make sense.

Well, yeah, my wife's pointing out that they are documentary. They need to make sense. What is more important is that they make sense as far as what you are illustrating in the process of your recipe than that they be, you know, works of art.

Okay, makes sense. Okay, we also had a question from Judith Kingsbury, and about the best way to get some good food shots at home. Without a decent camera or any special equipment? I mean, is there some magic you can work?

Yes, I mean, you can— again, the same principles apply, all right? Pay attention to what the light looks like on your plate and manipulate it until you get what you like, all right? I mean, that ultimately is what it's about. You don't need fancy equipment. I would strongly recommend the purchase of a tripod. I cannot stress this enough. Whether you're using, you know, a point-and-shoot camera or whether you're using a 4x5 camera like that thing sitting here, you need a tripod. It really is important. I know it seems like a, you know, a tedious expense, but a tripod is really important, especially if you're not working with you know, high-powered flash. And even then, I use a tripod 90% of the time, but for compositional reasons. I mean, the flash will take care of any camera movement, but for compositional reasons, because otherwise you get your shot and, you know, if you're just hand-holding it, the plate moves to the left and to the right, and if you want it centered, you know, the tripod is a very valuable tool. And in that situation where you're at home You know, especially in today's world, okay, you don't need a lot of fancy and expensive equipment to make good photographs. I mean, these point-and-shoot cameras— and I mean, for whoever's interested, I am within the very near future going to do a blog post and everything, or a series of photos, of food photos, every one of which will be shot with a pocket Nikon Coolpix, because this is a myth, okay, that the big expensive Nikons or Canons or Pentax or whatever are what you need. They're great to have, okay, but for practical purposes, I do not need a camera that goes to 25,000 ASA, ISO. I just don't need it. That's for shooting in the dark. Okay, it's just for practical terms, you don't need that. If you have a decent camera— look, I know somebody who does her food photographs with her iPad, all right, and she does a great job of it, you know, again, because she pays attention. It's not the tool, but, you know, I understand these are days of tight budgets, and I understand that, you know, Things can be expensive, and you have to set money aside, and so on and so forth. A tripod, they don't have to be hugely expensive, but it is probably the most useful purchase you can make. You don't need to replace your camera necessarily, you know, because a lot of the problems that you may be having with your camera might just be solved by a tripod. Or certainly helped. But mainly, in answer more directly to your question, again, use the principles we talked about earlier here. Pay attention to the light and what it does. Look at the light. Look at how it affects what you do.

Okay. You know, you just touched on something. We had another question, too, that was posted earlier, and it was, you know, you mentioned the iPad as how do you take a good picture with your iPhone? If that's all you've got to work with.

Turn off the flash. Turn off the flash. Thank you, Renee. By all means. And use the principles we've been talking about. Look at the light. You know, exercise. You know, look at what it is. Move around it. You know, I mean, even if—

There are some iPhone apps and probably for the other type of phones too, some applications that can enhance the photos once you take them. I know Photoshop has a little thing that you can load for the iPhone that can clear, you know, make it clearer, brighten it and things like that. So you can still do some enhancements on the phone itself.

Look, I saw online this guy who did these really, really cool photographs with an iPhone. But they were very arty. They were very reminiscent of what back in the '90s and late '80s, there was this thing called Polaroid transfer, okay, which was a technique of using Polaroid film in a particular way, but it gave an extremely whimsical, very impressionistic kind of look to the two images.— and this guy was doing this stuff with his iPhone. Again, it's not the tool, it's the photographer. It's what you do with your mind. Of course it's going to have limitations, all right? You are going to have a limitation of lenses. You're going to get, you know, certain distortions you may or may not want, but as it's perfectly fine as a tool. And in some ways it might be a little better because I'll tell you one of my pet peeves and one— something that people need to realize, especially if they want people to come and hang out at their blogs. The iPhone takes a relatively small picture by comparison. Okay? One of the most aggravating things is when you go to somebody's blog and it takes forever to load. Part of the reason for that is people are putting up high-resolution images. 300 DPI is completely useless on the computer. The appropriate resolution for web is 72 DPI. And you're just doing yourself a favor by using the appropriate resolution because your site, especially if your sites are very photographically heavy and you have big photos like we do on our site— ours are large photos. 72 DPI. 300 DPI is— you're not going to notice the difference. 300 DPI is a printing resolution for magazines. For the web, res it down to 72 DPI. Your site will load faster. Okay? You'll take up less room on your computer in storage. You'll take up less room on your website in storage. So one small advantage to using sort of an iPhone type camera, is you're already starting with a fairly small image, and so, you know, it'll transmit a lot quicker. But again, some of the greatest photos in history were taken with a box brownie, which was literally a cardboard box back at the turn of the 20th century, created by Eastman Kodak. It's what put Kodak on the map. And Margaret Bourke-White, who was a, I believe, sometime somewhat later in that period. Amazing photos. A little box brownie. So again, the cameras are great, and you know, if you can afford a better camera, yes, it does lend more versatility. It'll lend a better-looking image because the more, you know, expensive cameras have more sophisticated sensors, so they have better color processing, so on and so forth. But I mean, in this day and age, you can get great images. Now, if you want to publish a book that's not sort of an artistic idea of a book like this, you know, there is a guy out there who published a book of photos from his iPhone, which is great. But if you, you know, want to publish sort of a book that is maybe a little bit more prosaic, a cookbook, you know, then your iPhone is probably not going to make you very happy, and you are going to need to go up to some kind of a camera of some sort. Okay.

We had a question from Joanne DiPaolo, and it says, once you get the light right, once you got that, where should the subject be shot from, above, or what would the best angle be? And Anne Bocek— or check— Dennis Littley also commented on the same question, he goes, "With a tripod, how do you use it to get different angles or viewpoints of your food?" Good questions. I think I'm back. Yep, you're back.

Okay, yeah, no, that's a good question. Look, these are aesthetic choices and they're personal choices. Okay, we were messing with this box of chocolates earlier and I had the camera in a direct position over it.

Oh, we lost you again.

Okay.

There you go. Let's try this again.

Okay. Because I wanted to make a point, although when you have something very graphic like that, it's really— I mean, it's a cool thing to shoot overhead because you have— I'll see if I can get it back where it was, or at least some semblance of it— because you have these real strong patterns, you know, and that's kind of cool. You know, I mean, you could do an overhead like that and it's cool because, you know, you're exploiting these patterns. I'm always telling— by the way, there's a very good example of lens distortion right here. This is what happens when your wide-angle lenses are too close to your food. It really is, you know, a lot— it's more than anything else, I think it's a personal aesthetic choice, but also it is how is your subject, i.e., the food, your recipe, going to be best served. You know, sometimes, for example, shooting a hamburger at eye level All right? It's a very unnatural point of view, but it's very effective, as you can see when you drive down the road and look at any, you know, Carl's Jr. or McDonald's or Burger King ad. Okay? I personally always strive to create what would be a natural angle for somebody to see food. Again, this goes back to my idea of pictures telling stories. All right? There was a French photographer. His name was Cartier-Bresson. He was a photojournalist, great photojournalist. He developed this idea called the captured moment, and in his philosophy, it was that the light, the action, everything came together at this one nanosecond in time, and that's when you trip the shutter. This guy was a genius. His photography is insane, okay? But I love that idea, and in a certain way, with apologies to Mr. Cartier-Bresson, I apply it to food photography in the sense that it's fun to make an image that appears as though it's something that was a captured moment in time, that was, you know, the Italian sub at the trattoria or the the, you know, the martini in that dimly lit room. And your camera angle to some degree determines that. I always try and create a camera angle that would be what is the natural angle at which a person experiencing this dish would be seeing it. If they're sitting down, it's what, 50-degree, maybe 60-degree angle of view? So I take that into consideration. Some things you're just not going to get any other way than shooting them overhead effectively. So partly it depends on your subject, partly depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to create a tremendously graphic photo We did a photo of some blueberry muffins recently, and one of my— one of my favorite photos in a way, because it's just a straight down on the muffins in the tin, and it's just all about texture. It's not pretty in the sense of it doesn't have beautiful colors, it doesn't have roses or whatever, but it's cool looking. It's gray, you know, steel or aluminum, whatever those muffin pans are made out of, you know, they're that gray material, and then you've got the muffins in there. It's just cool because it's graphic. So, I mean, what you're asking, the answer is extremely subjective, and ultimately you need to do something that pleases you. Because if you like it, somebody else is going to like it. And it's really easy to get into these ideas of, I got to shoot for Food Gawker, or I've got to shoot for, you know, whatever. I want to do it more this way because— just find your own voice and do it because, you know, the cream rises to the top. And if you're true to yourself, chances— people pick up on that. People are aware of that. People sense it.

Excellent. Okay, Adam, I think we're going to wrap it up about here now. We've gone quite a while, and a lot of great information. I think we've got a lot more we can touch on, but we're going to save that for the next one. All righty. We can dig into some more things, but you've given people a lot to think about. I know people are going to be going back and rewatching this to catch the points that you made about light.— and about how to use light and how to set a tone and set a mood. I think that's probably the most important thing you really covered tonight was telling that story with the picture. The fact is that ultimately, you got to please yourself. You can't shoot for somebody else. You can't shoot for your audience or for Food Gawker or for Taste Spotting because if you're not happy with it, it's definitely going to come through in the image that you're shooting.

So— but also, I mean, in the same sense that what you write— and again, this goes back to sort of the beginning of the show where I'm assuming that most of the people that we're talking to tonight and with tonight are people who have an interest in creating, you know, something worthwhile for themselves via a blog of some kind, you know. Which is great. I mean, it's a wonderful platform for all kinds of things, but as much as in your writing, and you need— there needs to be a sincerity in what you write about, however it is, whatever your subject, however it is you write, you need to have your own voice. Equally, in your photographs, you need to have your own voice. You know, photography is an immensely technical and endlessly complicated field. Food photography is extremely challenging. You know, what I've shared with you all tonight is, is, you know, some really fundamental principles that if you think about them and try and observe them, try and start looking at light when you're out on the street, when you're at the supermarket, when you're at the drugstore, when you're walking your dog, when you're watching TV, Look at light, you know, see it as something not just illuminating, but see it as a tool. And try and then apply the things that appeal to you. And it takes time to develop a sensibility like that. The single thing that will most improve your photography is the awareness that light is a tool and that you can manipulate it and use it. To your satisfaction. It's really what it's all about. And there, then your voice is true in your photography as much as it is in your prose. And there it is. There it is. Thank you, Chef Dennis. This is a real privilege. Thank you all for joining us.

Adam, thank you very much. Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Renee, thanks for stopping in. Thank you so much for having me.

It was our pleasure.

I'm glad you could be with us tonight to add to our panel. It's always a treat to have someone from Google+ on here that we get to talk and get to spend some time with, not just on random postings and saying hi as we're passing through the web. It's nice to have you here. Adam, again, you did a great job tonight, and I really appreciate all of your insights and all of your help., and the time that you spent with us.

It's my pleasure. I've enjoyed it enormously. I really have, Chef. There were great questions. Events like this always kind of make you think about the things that you do instinctively, but it makes you think about it again, which is good. It's refreshing. This was a blast for me. I mean, even the technical glitches and everything was— I mean, this was an experience, too. I mean, you know I've never done one of these before. Thank you for your guidance and help and for having me.

No problem. Pleasure. Trial by fire sometimes is the best way to learn how to get through these things. We've all experienced them. We've all experienced them, and now you have, too. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Makes us stronger. There you go. All right. Well, thank you all. Well, Wayne, it was a pleasure meeting you. Thank you for joining us. Oh, it was a pleasure meeting you, too.

Marie, don't be a stranger.

Oh no. You know, if you want to write me, you know, if I can be helpful, if you want to email me, my email is on the website, you know what I mean? You can contact me. I certainly will. Just be a little patient because I get busy and it takes me a while to get back. But, you know, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have as best I can do it.

Thank you. And leave some questions if there's things we didn't get to. I'm sorry, but if you have any other questions, leave them here. I'm sure Adam will check the stream later, and if he can answer you, I'm sure he'll drop you an answer right there.

They could form the basis for another little hangout.

Absolutely. Absolutely. My friends, thank you very much for coming tonight.

You guys have a very good night. We'll see you soon.

See you soon. I'm Chef Dennis, and I'm going to sign off for the G+ Food Bloggers Community Education Series. Have a great night, and we'll see you all real soon. Bye-bye.

Bye, Chef.