Last week I had the pleasure of shooting the new menu items for Eddie’s Attic, which if you don’t know about it is a completely rad music venue here in Decatur (Atlanta). The food at Eddie’s is described as gourmet bar food, which I think is funny and charmingly self-effacing.
The chef there, Francina Sanders, is wicked talented and could make a mud sandwich taste great. I’ve eaten a lot of the things on the Attic menu, and I’ve also been lucky enough to be invited over to Francina’s house for a meal, which I won’t go into because I’d go on and on about how ridiculously amazing it was and we’d all just end up super hungry. Here are a few shots from the Eddie’s Attic food shoot.
(Skip ahead if you don’t want to nerd out on photography.)
PHOTOGRAPHER NERDOUT SECTION: The biggest deal in a food shoot is the lighting. I know I know, it’s photography–the lighting is always important. But in a food shoot, having an interesting magenta light shining on your subject and making them look weird and interesting is actually really bad. You want the light to be as unintrusive as possible so the colors of the food look natural and appetizing.
When I got to Eddie’s it was about 10am and it was raining outside. I had brought external lighting so that I could control the color and intensity of the light as much as possible, but when I got into the room we would be shooting in I saw that there was a huge wall of windows on one side of the room. Also, since it was raining outside I basically had a huge soft diffused light coming in from the windows. So I set up a small black table about 6-8ft away from the windows, took a manual white balance reading and did a couple of test shots. Everything really came out nice.
Photogs, two points to make here: 1. Don’t believe that you have to have the super expensive, fancy schmancy light setup to get great pictures. 2. Don’t be afraid of cloudy days! Clouds are your friends, inside and outside. Sure, on a cloudy day you’re not going to get that great magic hour gold highlight on anyone’s hair, but the light will be even, colors will look great, and you’ll still be able to shoot at nice fast shutter speeds.
Be creative…that’s why we all do this. Don’t get tied to the way everyone else does it. On this note, next up on the blog will be a recap of my completely homemade, hardware store studio lighting set up. And it only costs $50!!
Until then, here’s the food.
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