I have a pretty hard time taking pictures of food in my kitchen. I have all sorts of different light sources and it really makes for some difficult shots. I have: halogen, CFL, natural light (from only one side), and incandescent. The result is that I have a lot of different Kelvin values at play, often in the same picture, and it is no end of problematic.
This last weekend, I made some braised short ribs for dinner with another couple in our neighborhood. It is one of those epic recipes, so I decided to take some pictures along the way. I decided to bother with setting the white balance manually, meaning, by cueing the camera to measure the white balance and then filling the viewfinder with a piece of plain white paper.
The results are SO much better doing this. My photos needed such little editing in post to be sufficient! And it seems within my grasp to finally get a great picture in my kitchen, if I really stage a shot well and am careful about post. And yes, I know that if I shoot in RAW, I can change the white balance ad infinitum in post. Shooting in RAW just takes longer to process in post, however, so I still default to jpg for my edits (I shoot in RAW+jpg mode so I have both options as I want them). Time is at a premium and I am losing my perfectionist tendencies in favor of producing ANY output at all.
I wish I had some of the off-color past photographs handy at the ready, to show you how bad my kitchen pictures used to be, but I don't. A little thing like that doesn't stop me from blogging anymore, though, no sirree. So, here's some snaps:
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| A little too warm, but still, pretty good in my eyes |
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| Excellent true color under my halogen hood lights. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE. Not even close. |
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| Nothing special about the color, but whoo-wee, this is a one-handed camera shot without looking through the viewfinder, while using the other hand and my eyes to pour the wine into the braise. damn i'm good. |
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| Christie took some beautiful bottle pictures when we were in The Mexico! last year. I was enchanted with how she caught the clarity of the glass and the reflections of the light in such a crisp way and have tried here and there to reproduce them, ever since. This is nowhere close to her photos, but I'm trying and getting a little better. I needed a faster shutter here, but my kitchen just doesn't have a lot of light.
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| I'm actually very frustrated with this photo, as I don't want so much of the foreground blurred. That said, it's a picture from the darkest corner of my kitchen, so I think the result is remarkable. These are the herbs laid on top of the short ribs which are nestled in their braising liquid, in my Staub dutch oven. (No, not THAT kind of dutch oven.) |
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| roasted and peeled pearl onions. skins top left, peeled innards bottom right. Under my halogens again. I can't get over how vibrant and true the color is. I have SO struggled with this area of my kitchen. |
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| This photo is unremarkable but I figured I should show the finished dish. By this point it's 8pm and there is no natural light at all, AND the lights right above this plate are a bit wonky. The meat was not at all burned (just a slight char) but this photo makes the meal look like a shriveled burnt mess. That braised beef short ribs, sauteed chard with roasted pearl onions, and cook's illustrated potato puree in the back.
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Love the wine pouring shot. I call those shots intentional accidents. You intentionally took the shot but it's a happy accident it turned out. :) Also, congrats on joining us on the manual white balance setting. I prefer to set mine myself, and play around with it when light is wonky, even though mentors and teachers continue to tell me it's easier to just use the automatic setting.
ReplyDeleteWow, that was some funky formatting. Fixed now.
ReplyDeleteChristie - do you have and use a grey card, or do you do the measurement with your camera where you take the picture of a white/neutral object and let it calculate the right white balance? Or do you just mean you try the different presets (cloudy, shady, etc)? I have good luck with the auto and/or presets in most cases, but my kitchen area (and living room area for that matter) is a huge challenge with all the different light temperatures going on. My photog instructor for my last class basically said that when the light values are all over the place and cast on the same object, that you often need to just go black and white. I'm sure that is true sometimes, but I was happy with the progress I made for measuring/setting a custom WB!
I usually use the different presets. For food, black and white seems less than ideal. You want to see those yummy food colors. :) For your situation, I would attempt to get a reading but usually the presets are close enough - if you find the one that gets you closest to what you're looking for color-wise - that you can shoot using the preset and then adjust in post-editing. However, I know that is less than ideal when you're just looking for something ready-to-use. These shots are great. You're well on your way to figuring out what works best in your kitchen. Once you do that for winter, you can do it again for spring, summer, and fall lighting.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm guessing that I can look up the calculated wb on the pictures I took, compare that to the preset wb options, and then just figure out the closest preset WB's to use for the different areas of my kitchen? Is that what you're saying? Pretty clever -- I never thought of that!
ReplyDeleteSad thing though is my D5000 is setup such that Shutter and Aperture are easy to access, and then I have one other function button that I can manually choose the function. I have it set to control ISO right now. So to change wb for each picture, I'd have to go into the menu to re-set it each time (I am often going from photographing under my hood to the island and back and forth and back and forth -- and they are very different K values). Maybe I will change my Function button to be wb instead of ISO since I change my ISO less often.
There's winter, spring, summer, fall, but also different times of the day which result in big differences too, at least in my kitchen. My next kitchen in a future house will prioritize beautiful light for photography purposes. Who cares about efficiency of workflow??
(or I could get a new camera)
ReplyDelete(shhh, who said that?)