Last night I attended what was the 5th evening of a separate Course I am participating in at Leiths which is devoted to Food Styling.
I do not really have any intentions of becoming a Stylist per se, but was hopeful it would assist me with overall food presentation on a plate. To be candid it is really focused on Food Styling,and the content is fairly sparse even on this subject, but I am learning a few things – like how to mix Marmite,washing up liquid and water together to “paint” meat to give it that just cooked/juicy look that appears in many advertisements or recipe books ! That was a surprise for me ! You basically undercook meat to style it and use the above process to get the desired effect.
Anyway last night was about Styling a simple salad for our first real attempt at doing something completely by ourself and were asked to bring in our cameras and an idea as to how our salad would look.
My effort is above which actually I am rather pleased with. It looks something like the image I had decided upon and uses a background prop as provided by our teacher Jane. I thought this background would work best with a dark plate and would highlight the red, green and yellow of the Tomatoes – which I think it did. After trying out a view different angles I decided a “helicopter” view was the best angle, notwithstanding the fact it compacts the image and you lose any perceived height.
The image was created by standing on a chair near a window to capture as much natural light as possible and was taken by boosting up the ISO to 640 due to the lighting conditions and that I had no access to a tripod. It was f4.50 at 1/40sec. There is no filter, photoshopping,post editing etc. Would have been easier with tripod but you have to deal with what you have !
Lets see if I can foodstyle a Potato next !
If I wanted to try to improve and edit/boost the colours, then maybe this could be the result ?
