What´s going on in the studio?
Once a week Sanna (from Veckans Middag.com) is providing a nice recipe and a cooking tutorial for the online grossery store Hemmalivs. My pleasant task is to shoot it and to taste it now and then.
This time we decided to shoot outdoors since the light seemed to be nice. A small Speedlight as fill, and a silver reflector whas all it took to even out the soft evening light.
The peppers were among other delicious things stuffed with cottage cheese, bacon, Feta cheese, fresh cheese and garlic!
Every now and then I have the delicious assignment to shot food and products for the food blog “Veckans Middag“. Most often this emanates in a tremendous hunger and a lively salivation. (Wich is good for the teeth my denstist tells me). Here are some pictures newly shot.
Playing with available light only (and some reflectors), outdoors and indoors.
Here Cloetta´s Royal wedding edition chocolate. (The Wedding Chocolate) With blueberries and lingonberries! Among other delicious ingredients! If you happen to see some pieces of chocolate missing in the product shot I know nothing about it!
Product shot
The fine italian ecological wine Dolce Vita Monica no 3745
Zeta, the fine brand of olives, oil and vinegar.
The studio is located in a very old building, the kind of building that has very deep windowsills. The window in the kitchen is right towards north. In a special time of the day, in a special time of the year, when the sun comes through a thin layer of clouds, it shines on the wall of a fairly high building to the opposite our kitchen window. The building has a warm, almost pink surface which is reflecting the light through the fairly dirty window which delivers a very rich, soft light.
That kind of light occured yesterday and luckily we happened to have some products perfect to be shot in this kind of light: A friend of my wifes has a nice business on Sicily, Citronodlingen, (The Lemon Orchard), at the foot of Etna. My wife had recently got some products sent to her from Citronodlingen for testing out and to tell about on her food blog.
This time it was chocolate, lemon cream, artichoke paste, and fantastic dried chili seeds.
The wall in the windowsill made a perfect backdrop and the light falling in through the window gave these jars with their delicious content a nice soft shine.
The Crema di Limoni is a complete success! And so is the Paté di Carciofi & Mandorle.
A tiny silver reflector to lighten up shadows a bit was all that was needed to get a good exposure here. I really like this light and I wish the window was four times bigger …
Spent the day shooting food with catering chef/food stylist Maria Dahlquist from The Food Company for a magazine article later this spring.
The idea is to produce pictures with strong, saturated colors , in contrast to traditional scandinavian food photography. Lets see if it is possible. We´re not really used to that…
More pictures to come after postprocessing. Here is one I couldn´t resist to upload.
Food styling: Maria Dahlquist, The Food Company
Not much happened in the studio this week, actually. Starting up a new isue of a comic magazine I produce twice a year. “Kalle Ankas Sommarlov” (Donald Duck´s Summer) An extra issue published all over the summer. A mix of cartoons and activity pages.
Looking for cartoons to the issue (I´m not drawing the cartoons, just choosing from Disneys bank of cartoons), planning the layout, thinking of a cover. Mostly administrative work in the startup. Nice and calm.
Going to do some food shots next week and I was browsing around my pictures to get some ideas of lighting. Maybe there will be enough available light through the windows to skip flashes?
Here are some pics I found in my archive. I really like to shoot food. Trying to make it look like available light.
My brother is a talented potter. This is part of a collection of coffee cups in his studio window.
(food styling; Sanna Ohlander)
Last autumn we decided to do a little side project, for fun and inspiration. We thought it would be nice to produce something of our own, with no special customer ordering the job. Sanna, project manager on our studio Centralateljén (and also my lovely wife) is running a nice food blog, Veckansmiddag (Week´s Dinners (not 100% sure of the translation here)). We decided to work with a little book, inspired of Sannas blog with dinner menus for all days of the year. The book is inspired by the thought of eating low carb food.
We had great fun! Sanna constructed menus, Peter wrote text and I shot pictures and layouted. Sanna and Peter even constructed a site, (Enkla Boken.se), as a small web bookstore.
The book is simply a bank of ideas of what to serve for dinner.
Some of the pictures were shot at home at the dinner table, with all the hungry kids waiting for dinner, others were shot in the studio.
To decorate the text we needed several food objects on white background. I really like to layout with this kind of pics!
This was just a couple of samples from the little book. We have quite a few ideas for more books, and are hoping it will be time for us to put some of them together soon.
Coffee!
Java Jive! The old jazz song from long ago. Spotify tells me that it was The King Sisters that played it. An ode to coffee! Sweet! And that was long before Cappuccino, Espresso, Macciato, Latte and all that was in reach for us common people.
I love coffee!
We are lucky enough to have our studio in the same block as the fantastic Patisserie David. Nothing is like his pastry! Or his coffee! This is located in the older part of Malmoe a block called S:T Gertrud. Sometimes when I wait for the coffee tho get colder I shoot a picture or two of the coffee I bought from him. Perfect for selling on stock.
We drink lots of it! I truly think that there is an almost visible connection between coffee and creativity. But thats just me…
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