Teaching others has become one of my favorite jobs. It has allowed me to step back and view my work and my process differently. I have learned that when shooting my shoot evolves in gradual iterations. I did a recent shoot for the Food Photography class that I teach at Nossi College of Art and it illustrates this point beautifully. In just a few photos the lighting and scene dramatically change with minor effort and gradual changes. After being a commercial photographer for 12 years it still blows my mind how moving a light even just a few inches can dramatically change a scene. Take a look at the evolution below.

The First Frame!

For this first frame, I knew the goal of the shoot. I wanted a bright scene with hard light. I would use just one strobe a Paul C Buff Einstein E640 with a 7-inch reflector. I wanted the light to rake across the cookies and create dark shadows with dramatic texture. This first frame achieves one of my objectives. We have hard light. Right now the scene is dark and moody though. You can not even see my background surface. For the next frame, I will move my light both further back to create a wider beam of light and also pan the light more towards the background

Now it looks like we are getting somewhere. The background has gotten brighter but it still does not quite have the right feel. I am going to turn the power down on the light a touch and then pan it further towards the background.

So it might not look immediately like this frame is any better, but it is. Our light is raking across the scene and the light is pretty even between the background and the foreground of the image. Now for the next frame, I want to do two things. First I think that the background is a little distracting and I really want to force the viewer to look at the cookies, so I am going to change the f stop of the camera to something shallower. In this case, I am using an old 75mm Pentax lens that has a lot of character to it so I want too really show that character off so we will shoot it wide open at f2.8. Second I’m going to have to change the power of the light down some. We were at f8 and now we are going to f2.8.

Now this image is really starting to go places. Honestly, we could pretty much call it here. We have beautiful hard light, the image has a mood, and it has layers, it has texture, good shape, and form. This image is good. But, I want to keep working the light and the image. I want to add some fill light on the left side of the image. This will lighten up the mood and allow us to have more texture on the left side of the cookies.

Now we are getting really close! One thing bothers me though. It looks like we have a second light on the background. There is a highlight on the background that I don’t like. So I am going to rotate my fill card so that it is further away from the background.

So far we have taken six images! We have totally changed the look, mood and feel of this image in 6 frames. Each move was pretty minor. We turned a light a few inches, we added a fill card, and we changed the f stop. This image is going to keep evolving over 11 more frames. Tiny changes to the light and to the framing of the image.

Frame 17!

So frame 17 is the first frame that I am truly happy with. Everything is positioned correctly. It has a great vibe to it. The mood is right. However, I also want a light and airy version of this image so for frame a few frames later we get to image 24 I will add in a fill card.

So this is the final image of this exact set up. I also wanted to experiment with some shorter shadows.

Frame 17 and frame 21 here are identical except for the height of the light. In frame 21 the light is about 3 feet above where it is in frame 17. This gives us a much smaller shadow it also puts more light on the front of the cookies. This looks pretty dang nice. Adding some fill will take it to the next level.

All I did here was add a simple fill card to camera left. This is probably my favorite frame of the scene with a vertical composition.

I wanted to capture a horizontal photo as well. For this I wanted to widen out the frame some and keep some negative space on the top of the frame. This meant lowering the tripod a touch, and scooting the camera back. The Pentax 75mm lens that I am using has a high billows factor meaning that the closer that you get the lens to the scene it gets darker.

To account for scooting back I went ahead and adjusted the f stop of the lens to f5.6 while leaving the power of the strobe where it was. The resulting frame was still about a stop to bright. At f5.6 the cookies in the background do not have a really pleasing out of focus rendering they look a little jagged. So for the next frame I am going to take the f stop to f8 to get a more pleasing rendering on the background cookies.

Looking at this frame there is a lot of good stuff going on, but it is not quite right. Now that we are at f8 the background and the surface are too distracting. So the 75mm lens is not going to do the trick for the wider horizontal frame. So I make the call to change to a 120mm lens. This lens is a more modern lens with modern coatings and a modern rendering, it also allows us to scoot back further and gain some more compression. All good things for this scene.

There it is! A horizontal scene that meets well with the vertical image that we did. A few simple changes had to take place to get an equally good horizontal scene. It was not just a simple shift of the camera axis. We had to move back, and change lenses. We needed up shooting this lens wide open at f4 to get a similar feel to the f2.8 of the vertical shot. I still wanted one more frame. I wanted to reduce and simplify the set a bit more.

I pulled the rest of the props away and left just the surfaces, the plate, and the cookies. A dramatic shadow with a hard edge on the left side of the frame. This is a simple and strong composition. We have tons of room for graphic design and copy or let it stand alone as a strong compositional photo. Tons of contrast and texture makes the cookies really stand out.

47 Frames

This shoot took a total of 47 frames and about 2 hours of time. It was a gradual evolution of an idea and a concept. Small changes from one frame to the next. If I had the time I would have taken many more frames. I could honestly work with this concept all day. I would love to have some overhead images of this set as well.

Nick Bumgardner is a food and product photographer based out of Nashville, TN. To get in touch with Nick and schedule your next photoshoot use the contact form.