Photo-A-Week: Dinner

So I'm a little late this week, but well worth it. At least for my stomach anyway. Last week's theme was dinner and tonight was time for me to make dinner, since I had President's Day off work and my wife did not. We decided to dig into our new Trader Joe's Dinner's Done cookbook and see what we found. Usually it's just trying to find a recipe that we already have everything in the house. Tonight we hit the jackpot for flavor.

Both of these dishes were packed full of yummy goodness, as my family so affectionately terms delicious food. First is the Kinda-Greek Salad this dish has grilled chicken in it but could easily be a vegetarian dish by removing the chicken or substituting it with some grilled tofu.

Second is the Roasted Asparagus with Tomatoes and Feta. Asparagus being one of our favorite vegetables, needless to say this one went over smashingly. My youngest daughter who doesn't even like tomatoes couldn't resist one covered in feta, salt, pepper, garlic and tasting faintly of asparagus.

These recipes and bunches more in the book are really simple to make. The Trader Joe's Cookbook is becoming one of our favorites.

Now for some mouth watering photography.

Photo-A-Week: Body Parts

This week's theme is really a broad topic. I struggled with this one because I wasn't sure what to write about, more less what picture to take. It seemed weird to write about the body part I was taking pictures of, that seemed a bit too intimate. I mean who wants to read me go on and on about someone's fingers? After some thinking I decided it would might be helpful for me to talk about how important body parts can be in photography, especially in photojournalism.

Photojournalism attempts to tell a story in pictures. Pictures of details tell a lot about a story and when wanting to tell a story about people, body parts add detail that brings that story to life. I greatly enjoy detail photography. You'll usually find me at a wedding hovering over hands taking pictures of jewelery or subtle touches between the bride and groom. At the baby portrait session I'm the one taking pictures of feet and little hands. I am often drawn to the detail shots of most of my favorite photographers, especially when they are creative.

Mostly what I wanted to do this week is challenge any photographers that read this blog is to take some detail pictures, especially body parts. Get some shots of your children's hands playing with Play-doh, or take some shots of the years of experience that are written in your grandmother's hands.  Look for the details and you just might find there's more to the story.

And to prove I took a body parts picture this week here's lookin at you.

Photo-A-Week: New

This week I decided to do some what of an instructional post. Not really a step by step tutorial but just show how you can create a professional marketing type product just by taking a picture in your basement. With a few photography tools and some Photoshop skills I created an ad out of something new to my life. I received some Sears gift cards for my birthday recently and just this past weekend went and procured my first cordless drill. So I'm a little behind on some things, so what.

I thought instead of just taking a picture of my drill I would try and make it a more appealing shot. The first thing that came to mind was a print ad for a cordless drill. Mind you, I am not a marketing expert so I didn't try anything fancy with the words used.

The idea I had was to have a sort of "out of bounds" shot of the drill. I wanted to make it look like a three dimensional shot. I knew I wanted a shot from below to make the drill look superior and commanding, as if I was looking up at a monument of it's greatness. Okay, so I'm a little excited to have a cordless drill in my life, gees it's 2011 and I just got one, cut me some slack. Anyway back to the drill monument.

I already had in mind to use a white background and then add other elements to the photo later in Photoshop. I sort of have a set up for doing small product like photography but it's not exactly what I want as an end result. I used to own a lightbox that I built a few years back from poster board, but I gave that to a friend when I wasn't using it anymore. DOH! Here are a couple shots of the setup for any of you looking to take on a project.

Ideally when shooting a product shot you want the light to be even, big and surrounding. Often times photographers surround elements with white boards and use big soft boxes for the light source. In most cases you want the light to be diffused, not specular. Lightboxes work very well because the light comes into the box and then bounces from everywhere. The lightbox above works great for small items like knives, or jewelery. Actually the friend I gave it to uses it to take pictures of his wife's ceramics.

But, alas, I did not have the lightbox anymore so I had to go a different route. I decided to go with a single light source very close with a big shoot through umbrella and hope it was large enough and soft enough. I was hoping that I could do this on what would be a shoe string budget for a photographer that doesn't have a Profoto set with big soft boxes. Everything that I used included three pieces of poster board from Wal-mart, a light stand, a 400ws strobe (this easily could be a hot shoe flash unit like a Nikon SB800) and a 48inch shoot through umbrella. I put everything on a table so I could get that "look from below" angle with the camera.

I used my wide angle lens open as wide as it would go then got really close to the subject. I wanted the wide angle distortion to this shot so that the tip of the drill looked closer than the rear. That would help me achieve to out of bounds look I wanted later in post. Fortunately for me I had enough spill from the light that it lit the background as well and I didn't have to put an additional light on the background to blow it out. Here is the shot of the setup.

The umbrella was a large enough light source, the reflections on the drill are nice and soft and the light is very even across the whole subject. In Photoshop I made some contrast and sharpening adjustments. I also went around and cleaned up any color distortions in the white on the background. There are lots of different ways to do this, for this one I used the dodge tool set to highlights at 100%. Once I had the drill the way I wanted it I was ready to bring it into a larger image for additional elements.

I wasn't looking for anything fancy from an ad design perspective but I wanted to show that with some quick elements added in Photoshop we could show how a photo like this would be used in an ad campaign say for print or for a website.

Like I said I wanted the photo to have a sort of "out of bounds" feel to it. This type of editing gives the photo a three dimensional feel. You can accomplish this by making the subject larger than its frame or in this case the banner behind it. Additionally I added a gradient inside the banner (from white to blue) to accentuate where my light source was coming from and I added a small gradient on the bottom of the banner to give the feel of a floor, adding even more to the three dimensional feel.

So all put together this is how it looks. Introducing My new Craftsman cordless drill!!! Yay!!