|
|
|
The Craft of Lighting: Lighting Food Shots
|
By John Jackman, June 23, 2005
Sooner or later, you'll have to light a food shot: a close-up of fruit, vegetables, roast turkey, soup, or some other comestible that must look tasty, appealing, hot (or fresh), and lip-smackin' good. It isn't as easy as it sounds. The proof is as close as your TV. A quick look at the locally produced restaurant commercials will show you how to shoot food. Where I live, there's a restaurant that had the local cable guys do its commercial. Sure, the plate is piled high, but the gravy looks congealed and pasty, and the salad wilted and colorless. The mystery meat is, well, unidentifiable.
The basic principles of lighting food aren't too complex. You want to show the shape of the food, so you don't use flat lighting. You want appetizing colors to pop, so don't shoot under ordinary fluorescents. Of course, made-for-film flos are quite good, but I'm talking about avoiding the stock tubes restaurants like diners typically use in their ceiling fixtures. Good flos with a high CRI (Color Rendering Index; 90+ preferable) are a good choice because soft light is the best way to bring out the beauty of food. Most DPs use standard incandescent soft banks for food shots; however, the closer the better. I don't think I've seen a really good food shot that was lit with hard-key light.
In a typical setup, a large soft bank is used either directly over the food, or above and behind the food. This does more than simply illuminate the food; it gives the food something to reflect as well. The food will be more appetizing if it looks moist or shiny. With most shiny objects, we must give the reflective surfaces something to reflect to give them shape and definition. Otherwise, they will appear dull and flat. For that reason, food shots should not be lit from the camera side. That's where positioning the bank above (or above and behind) comes into play. Figure 1 shows a picture of fruit using this lighting setup. Very often, a second soft bank or large white card will be placed off to one side to provide a second area of reflection. Moving or rotating the food under the lights enhances the effect because the areas of reflection will move, change, and glint.
 | | Figure 1. This fruit is lit principally by a large soft bank above and slightly behind the food. Image from the author's book, Lighting for Digital Video & Television, Second Edition (CMP Books, 2004). |
So this brings me to the nonlighting aspect of this column: food-photography tricks. Unless you have the budget for a food stylist--the culinary equivalent of a makeup artist--you'll have to primp the food yourself. The most basic trick is to spray the food with nonstick aerosol cooking spray, which will make it look moist and edible (long after it has actually become inedible). Some food shouldn't be too shiny, so a light spray is all that is required.
Meats must generally be very undercooked for photography; grill marks are often added manually with a red-hot skewer. Select each food item carefully for appearance. Food stylists will carefully select the best sesame bun and then hand-glue sesame seeds to fill in sparse areas. The burger in a commercial must have a perfect, frilly, deep-green piece of lettuce and a ripe slice of red tomato, all carefully assembled to look best for the camera. Will you ever see such a perfect burger in the actual restaurant? Not a chance.
Hot food ought to be steaming, but it's really difficult to capture the actual faint wisps of steam on tape. Still, a touch of steam is effective; it's worth the effort. In the old days when everyone smoked, it was common to drill a hole in the table behind the hot food being photographed, and have a smoker hidden underneath with a cigarette, blowing smoke through a straw inserted in the hidden hole. You can use a similar arrangement with a glycol fog machine in a box with a hose running to a hidden hole. These days, of course, you can actually add the steam in post. Wisps of steam shot against a black backdrop can be keyed over the main picture and positioned convincingly. Use a simple luminance key and reduce the opacity. When you're faking this type of effect in post, subtlety is the watchword.
Clear liquids, especially tinted liquids like tea or beer, present a particular problem for lighting. In Figure 2, you'll see a close-up of a cup of tea. For the rich reddish color of the tea to be visible, the light must pass through the liquid and bounce off the white of the teacup's interior. If the key light is off to one side, or perhaps placed in the proper position as key for a face in an interview, the light won't reach the bottom of the cup and the liquid will appear dark, almost coffee-like. So in this shot, the large soft bank is located directly above and behind the cup of tea; you can see the specular reflection of the soft bank in the surface of the tea. Beer poses a similar problem. To see the appetizing color of the beer, the light must reflect off of some white surface behind the beer; yet clients generally want a dark background behind the beer bottle. The solution? Cut a white card in the shape of the beer bottle but slightly smaller, and place it directly behind the bottle. This allows the key light to bounce off the white card and show the color of the beer, which otherwise would look as dark as the background. It might sound silly, but it works. You may have seen this trick without knowing in a bunch of commercials.
 | | Figure 2. For the color in the tea to be visible, the light must pass down into the cup and bounce off the white interior. |
The keys to food lighting are some simple tricks and experimentation. Watch what the image looks like on the monitor, and twist, tweak, and primp until you get the food looking good--good enough to eat, that is.
|
|
|
|
|
|