Hey all,

I'm a 3 year s2k owner, and a long time photo enthusiast. Everyone loves seeing a decent car photo, so here is one I took with my old point and shoot:



I rocked an old point and shoot for about 6 years, trying to basically have fun and work on composition within the simple parameters of a point-n-shoot before buying a "real" camera.

About 3 months ago, my girlfriend and I started a food blog together (www.Primal-Palate.com) Suddenly we were swimming in a sea of _really_ good food blogs and needed to up our game with better photos. I bought a factory refurbished Canon XSi and started snapping away. About a month and 2000 exposures later, I finally feel comfortable posting some of my stuff here for critique (friendly, I hope). Oh, I also bought Dave Busch's 300 pg camera-specific guide, which has been immensely helpful.

I'm mainly looking to just share some of the photos with you, but also looking for some pointers from some seasoned veterans. Thanks

1.


2.


3.


4.

 

They look fine but in #1 bit more DOF would help IMO.
May be the same with 2nd shot.
Gaja

 

So (excuse the newbness here) ... does that mean I would increase my aperture value (make aperture smaller) to make more of the subject in focus?

Thanks

 

On # 1 and 2 you want to draw the viewers eye into the plate, your focus point is in the middle of the food. What you want to do is get the front edge of the food into focus and have the blur behind that.
Something like this, notice where the focus point is:







Notice the front focus draws the eye into the plate ,also leave your background uncluttered when shooting food. The emphasis is on the food do not leave visual distractions from that. If you look at my posted examples the cropping achieves this while still following compositional rules. The other thing to keep in mind is the angle of shooting. Shoot from a proper angle which draws the eye into the food and allows you uncluttered backgrounds

Hope these few tips help

 

My attempt...unprocessed shot:

 

^ wow, your creation or a restaurant's? That is REALLY impressive. Shot is great too!

Thanks for the pointers guys! I'm trying to take Zippy's advice and make the area of focus at the front edge of the subject.

 

Shot number 3 looks great.

 

Not bad, here is another tip. Make sure your shadow goes to the backside of the plate. another words make your light come from the opposite direction from which is shown now. You do not want to hide your detail and food in shadows.