Malaysian nibbles

A couple of weeks ago at the Commercial Photography course I am doing we spent quite a bit of time looking at some fine examples of food photography and reverse engineering their lighting so that we could attempt to light food in the same way.  This wasn’t an exercise in copying someone else’s work.  Rather, it was an exercise in learning how to “read” light, and to be able to deduce how an image has been lit by looking at it.

This is a very useful thing to be able to do, and is something I started trying to when I first started to learn about light.  I find now that I will look at photographs, and even television programmes or films, and often find myself subconsciously thinking about how the subjects or the scenes were lit.  And I’m sure my success rate is improving as I go, and as that increases so does my knowledge about lighting.  This is what takes this type of reverse engineering beyond being an attempt to copy someone else’s work.

I chose the image above to accompany this post for two reasons – firstly it is one of the few food photography shots that I have taken, and secondly, I don’t recall how it was lit so it is a good chance to reverse engineer the lighting.

Actually this shot was not really intended to be a food photography shot.  It is meant to be more of a detail shot from some sort of a temple in Penang, Malaysia, where this little bowl of dried fruit, and the bowl of dried leaves behind were, I gather, left out as some sort of an offering.  If I had taken it as a shot of the food itself I would have stopped down the aperture from f/2.8 to give me depth of field throughout the bowl, while still leaving the bowl in the background go out of focus.

What’s more interesting here though is determining something about the light from the image.  First of all if you look at the shadows under the bottom right of the bowl (there are two, of different colours) you can deduce that there are two light sources in the shot.  The shadow colours are, I imagine, due to the fact that the bowl is translucent, and the fact that they are different suggests two different types of light source – the predominant one is day light, and causes the red shadow because it tallies with the camera white balance. The other is more difficult – I’m going to speculate it is tungsten or candlelight, and causing the orange/yellow shadow.

Update: I have the cause and effect backwards here, as well-explained in the comments by reader JC Dill.  The yellow shadow is due to the daylight source, and vice versa.  The daylight shadow is yellow because some of it is still lit by the tungsten/candle source) and vice versa.  I’d recommend you read the first comment below and then refer to what I originally wrote (which follows – it didn’t seem fair to change it after being directed onto the right track… you can learn from my mistakes).  Understanding which shadow is from which source allows me to correctly determine the position of the two light sources, which is the reverse to what I initially guessed below.

I can tell from the relative softness of the edges of both shadows that the daylight source is larger.  I can also tell from it’s position relative to the bowl that it is positioned almost above the subject, a little to the camera left side.  Putting this together with the large specular highlight on the inside edge of the bowl and I’d suggest that it is from a large skylight in the roof.  (Remember, I can’t recall at all how this was lit or much about the layout of the room, so this information is all coming from the image itself, and may be wrong!).

Regarding the secondary light source, apart from the shadow it throws it doesn’t appear to be throwing a lot of light on the subject relative to the daylight source, so it seems to be fairly low power.  This tallies with a tungsten or candle source.  Its position is high and camera left, so it might be a candleabra next to the subject, which would certainly fit the setting, or a light hanging from the ceiling perhaps.  Either way, it is very much a fill light to the large soft main light we’ve already identified.  It’s shadow is more defined around the edges, so it is either a smaller source, or further away.  I suspect it is actually quite near to be throwing enough light to give a shadow, but quite small to make those harder edges of that shadow.

I have some wider shots of this room which I must try to find and we’ll see later in the week if I am right in any of my assumptions about the lighting.  Even if I’m not, trying to figure it out is in itself a learning process, and something that photographers who are interested in lighting should be encouraged to do regularly.