A new shop recently opened near my house and, being much closer than the other shops in the neighbourhood, is a welcome addition to the locality. It’s just the thing for a Sunday morning when you want to pick up the paper.
Yesterday morning, while doing just that, I spotted a Gingerbread Man and thought it would be a nice Sunday treat. I then saw a Gingerbread Woman, and was about to buy both when this Gingerbread Family caught my eye – a clever idea, and an economic one too, as it turned out that if you bought the family the kids came free.
I took them home and as Aoife and I were about to tuck in she said I should take a photograph of them, so I left her to her coffee and the Sunday Times and took them into the kitchen for a quick photoshoot. Time was short as I was hungry, so I wanted to do something simple, but at the same time had it in my head to post the results here, so needed more than a snapshot on my phone.
So the thought process behind this shot goes as follows.
For food photography, generally a good idea is to light the food from above and behind, and so this was what I do. There’s a scientific explanation as to why this is and it talks about the family of angles, and the incidence and reflection of light, but there are gingerbread people waiting to be eaten, so let’s just take it at face value for now that this is a good starting point.
I don’t want to use a hard light source such as a bare flash, as that would leave harsh shadows, so soft light is what I am after. I put the plate with the gingerbread family (in hindsight, the plate wasn’t the best idea – I’ll explain why in a moment) in front of the kitchen window, thinking that the soft light coming in the window, above and behind the plate, will provide sufficient illumination. However it is dull outside, and I also want to hold focus from the front to the back of the plate, so require a small aperture. The resultant shutter speed that I need will be too slow for me to hand hold the shot, and I don’t want to have to set up a tripod.
Instead I take my SB-800 out of the camera bag and, remembering that I don’t want hard light, my Lumiquest Softbox III, which, although a small softbox, when used close to the subject, is relatively large. Holding this off-camera light above and behind the subject, I use the commander mode on my D300 to trigger it via the pop-up flash, and set it to 1/128th power. The resultant frame is hugely underexposed, so I increase the power and reshoot, eventually settling on 1/32 as the power level to expose the gingerbread family adequately.
There are still reasonably large shadows in front of the family, at their feet, due to where the light is coming from, so I dial up the pop up flash to about 1/16th power to fill these.
In fact, I should have taken a more efficient frontal light source than the pop-up flash (perhaps my SB-600) and paid more attention to its power level so as to more adequately fill the shadows caused by the main light. Also, I mentioned earlier that I would come to regret using the plate, and this is because it creates specular highlights which reflect too much of the main light – the ideal surface to put these on would have been wood, which would have reflected the main light in a diffuse manner in much the same way as the chocolate does. In fact, even had I put them on the worktop I probably would have avoided the highlights that catch the eye at the centre of the frame.
However I was hungry, and my subjects were edible, so while for the sake of my photography I should have been thinking about these issues and ways to solve them, instead I was trying to decide whether I would eat an adult or a child first.
I may just have to buy more of these and try again. Purely for the sake of getting a better picture, of course…
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