Food photo colour balance

David A. Goldfarb said:

Well, some food would look better out of focus--

http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/

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ROFL! That is so bad it's good!

I shudder thinking back and remembering that our home-ec teachers used to actually encourage us to create dishes like that!

Most of the recent cookery books I have bought have very much been of the real food photography, not faked type. Nigel Slater's latest for example (everything he ate for a year, photos tajken before eating), and Dan lepard's baking books. Fashions have changed, though packaging versus cookbooks are rather different. I slightly know a food photographer, who finally went digital recently, but with an MF back - you cant really do food photography without camera movements I dont think, at least for smaller foods.

I do food in restaurants and we never use fake stuff, some trickery every once in a while as others have mentioned. Twenty some yeras ago, shooting food in a studio, there was much more trickery and fake stuff than you see today. I shoot 5x7 or 4x5 and generaly shoot Astia which I find to be the most dead neutral color film. As for color balance I use a color meter and cc filters.

It was always a heartbreaker to toss a huge mouthwateringly picture-perfect Turkey that smells like Thanksgiving in Heaven right into the garbage after a session. Truth was, it was only cooked about a quarter inch deep. If the breast was sliced exposing the interior, a heat gun quickly cooked the visible parts.

One client was an English Muffin company. If they needed a photo with one split muffin on a plate, they would send about two gross of loose muffins in large clear plastic bags. The stylist would choose a couple dozen of the most photogenic and carefully split them, groom them with tweezers and toast them by hand with a heat gun and torch. The top and bottom halves in the picture were never from the same muffin.
What happened to the other couple of hundred English Muffins that didn't make the cut? Man, I used to eat a lot of English Muffins back in those days.

roteague said:

These guys probably aren't using a run of the mill DSLR, more likely MF digital or a scanning back.

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Yes, the other day when I went to show the apartment to a prospective tenant my photog was there. I kidded him about leaving a Hassy behind for me since he was now all-digital.

He didn't tell me which camera it was for - but he told me he had just purchased a digi scanning back - it cost $30,000!

The work he does justifies this expense, of course. But it still seemed a bit amazing that a camera back would cost as much as a near-luxury car!