I'm now selling my photos!!!

I now host galleries of my favorite photos @ www.lloydshell.zenfolio.com Feel free to surf over there to see photo's that may have drifted into the darkest reaches of the archives here on Blogspot.

I also have begun selling my photographs when requested, I can handle most sizes and finishes either locally or via my on-line printing service.

Thanks for looking!

Lloyd
lloydshell@gmail.com

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Food Photography and a new technique!!

I friend from our old neighborhood makes the most FANTASTIC cupcakes, she offered to drop off a couple of cupcakes in exchange for some photos before we ate them. unhesitatingly I said YES!!!! Did a dance of joy and began planning how I wanted to shoot them. Seeing as it was a work week and I would not be able to use the natural light in my dining room, I knew it would be using my lights and umbrellas and I decided to go with a dark background. Next time I will likely go white, I think that will look better. The black has it's positives though.

The lighting was just  by the seat of the pants, move them around and see what it looks like. The new technique that I have never tried was focus stacking. With getting close enough to fill the frame  with the cupcake I struggled to get enough depth of field due to the physics of how lenses work and inadequate power of lighting. Even at f16 I could not quite get the whole thing in focus. What focus stacking does is take shots where you change nothing but the focus between individual shots, and pick the areas with the best focus and blend them together to increase how much of the image is in focus. I stacked only two images one focused about 1/4 of the way into the cupcake, and another where the frosted heart is in focus. Best part was that the software did it all for me. I didn't know until I recently found an article on it that Photoshop could do that. I was way excited. Here is the article if you care.

Had a lot of fun, hope to get better at it!










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