Available Light
I mentioned the effects of interior lighting on products and especially food. It can taint colours. Tungsten often produces a yellow tint. Flouresent can tint blue. It’s important to get colours close to the actual product as possible which is extremely hard to do with available interior light only.
Another pitfall of shooting products indoors in available light is that it’s coming from everywhere. What do I mean? There’s no direction to the lighting. It’s not exciting or dramatic, it’s just an image taken in available light!
I photographed the below image with available light with my phone. iPhones struggle in low light! There was window light from the left and tungsten lights above, to the right, in fact everywhere.
You can learn a lot by looking at images like this, dissect them and photograph again in better light later on.
Analysing Images
There are many highlights in the above image. On the right side of the dish we have a big window light highlights. I strive to get large window highlights like this in food images. They normally have impact but here they don’t.
On the left side of the photograph, specular highlights can be seen which are from inside artificial lighting. I find these distracting. There is also a major white balance problem which happens when shooting anything in mixed available light. The left side of the image is off white and has a yellow tint to the dish. On the right side of the plate, the light is from the window and much cooler
Solutions
There are a number of solutions to improving the above image;-
Move the dish of food near a window to flood it with window light;
Turn off indoor lighting;
Block artificial interior lighting from the food.
Use flash.
I’ll be talking more about lighting in the next Tog Tip when I’ll also be looking at creating perfect light with natural light and flash lights.
Don’t forget to give me a little support on my posts on here or elsewhere. I would really appreciate that.
Ray
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