Food photographed for advertisement is highly stylized. Professional food stylists may use the same ingredients that you’d get from McDonalds when you order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but they prepare it more painstakingly; hand selecting the right bun, searing the hamburger patty perfectly, strategically placing pickles, using a palette knife and emboss gun to sculpt melted cheese, and employing syringes to artfully place mustard and ketchup. The resulting stylized cheeseburger is then photographed and Photoshopped.
The reason for all this fettling is because food is difficult to photograph well. Journalist and advertising veteran Terry O’reilly asserts that food is boring to look at when it’s just sitting static on a plate. When you put food under studio lights, it’s starts to wilt. Food stylists and photographers have had to come up with all sorts of tricks to walk the line between fakery and enhancement.
If you look at historical food and beverage advertisements and old cookbooks; the images are all illustrations. Illustration gives you complete control and you don’t have to worry about the food deteriorating because; well there is no food. But even these illustrations don’t seem to be too appetizing.
With the advent of Television, marketing was faced with a new problem. Advertisers didn’t really know how to shoot food for TV commercials. The resulting presentations tended to be heavy in voice overs. The food just sits there static and boring. Pans and zooms were about as interesting as it got. Packaging and Logos tended to be the heroes of the presentation with the food coming up secondarily.
Advertisers often had to contend with FTC regulations. In 1968, Robson Ballantine was an art director for advertising agency BBDO New York. While creating a new Ad Campaign for Campbell’s Chicken and Stars, a problem cropped up. The heavy ingredients of the soup sank to the bottom of the bowl. The creative solution was to put marbles in the bottom of the bowl so that the Chicken and Pasta would have something to sit on for the camera. However the FTC was not pleased with this and threatened litigation. A new movement for truth in advertising was born. The FTC cast a suspicious eye on using mash potatoes and glue as a substitute for ice cream and milk.
By the 1970’s a new aesthetic developed thanks in large part to the vision of Elbert Budin. Budin wanted to “romance” the food (Canto & Drennan). He pioneered the genre of food presentation known as “Table Top”. Terms that come from this aesthetic include the “Prep Shot”; raw ingredients laid out on a banquet or cutting board, and the “Crave Shot”; tight angles on a juicy morsel at the end of a fork; and the “Hero Shot”; one final look at the food item, on the plate and ready to eat. Budin’s vision was in response to the hum drum description of the food. He wanted the viewer to feel actual hunger or thirst for the item being presented. Budin’s goal was to tap into the sensuality of the food, to appeal to the viewer’s senses.
To pull off these productions, elaborate Rube Goldberg style rigs would be constructed. These contraptions would be used to launch fruits. High speed cameras to capture high detail slow motion footage and luxuriate in the decisive moments; the juice spraying from an orange, the condensation dripping down the bottle. With modern technology, often times laser and infrared triggers are being used to capture the decisive moments.
While Budin pioneered close ups for “Table Top”, art directors at advertising agencies such as MacGuffin Films are taking it a step further; working to frame food in real world scenarios. It’s important to remember that even if the presentation seems natural, it is highly contrived. Big firms pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for marketing campaigns. The end product must do one thing. Sell a lot of food.
Preproduction:
Shopping List:
- Orange, Grape, Strawberry, Mexican Fanta in Glass Bottles
- Fake Fruit
- Colored Sand
- Medium Sized Clear Tub
- Fake Ice
- Construction Paper or Posterboard
- Glycerin
- Turtle Wax
- Atomizer Spray Bottle
Take color wheel and iPad while shopping for additional props so we can establish color harmony.
Equipment Used
- Canon 5D mkIII
- EF 70-200mm f/2.8
- 3x Profoto Strobe with 7” Beauty Dishes
- 2x Pocket Wizard Transmitter/Receivers
- Foba Camera Stand
- Large and Medium sized diffusion flats
- Thunder Grey Backdrop
- Full Tungsten CTO Gel
- Foam Core Black Card
- Grey Card
Camera Information:
- Canon 5D mkIII Tethered to M1 MacBook Pro 13”
- Shutter Speed 1/200th of a second
- Aperture f/5.6
- Exposure Mode Manual
- Auto White Balance
- Focus Mode: One Shot, Spot AF, 61 Point Selectable.
- ISO 100
Measurements:
- Sensor to Subject: 65”
- Camera Height: 43”
- Subject to Background: 88”
- Background Strobe to Background: 23”
- Background Strobe Height: 9.5”
- 4×8 Diffusion Panel to Subject” 17”
- Medium Diffusion Panel to 4×8 Diffusion Panel: 22” (angled)
- Separation Light to Medium Diffusion Panel: 18.5” Height 46”
- Wraparound Light to Medium Diffusion Panel: 11” Height 46”
- V-Flat to Subject (Reflector): 36”
- Surface Height for Subject: 32”
Lighting Diagram:
Test Image:
This test image was made to assess composition and to illustrate the issues we run into when trying to create Tabletop Still Life in ambient lighting conditions. With low light we are limited in ISO settings. Higher ISOs will produce nosier images. Low light may also dictate that we have to use wider aperatures that may impede our creative decisions for depth of field. By far the biggest challenges with ambient lighting come in the form of reflections from the overhead lights bouncing off the shoulder of the bottle and creating harsh specular highlights.
Critique and Analysis:
For the final image we used Two Profoto Strobes. One to create a separation highlight on the side of the bottle and another to create wrap around light for the front of the bottle. I did a cumulative metering with both lights popping, achieving f/5.6 at 1/200th of a second on ISO100; ,matching camera settings. We also placed a third Profoto with a Full Tungsten CTO on the thunder grey backdrop. My goal was to create a full tonal range on the backdrop without any hot spots. The backgound light was meter a full stop over the Camera’s aperture setting. The CTO Gel cast orange light onto the thunder grey backdrop and gives us an analogous/monochromatic scene. A V-Flat reflector was used to create fill on the shadow side of the still life.
In order to “romance the food”, we like to use a 50/50 mixture of glycerin and water. Will fill an atomizer spray bottle with this mixture. Spraying the bottle with this mixture gives the appearance of condensation making the drink seem cold and refreshing. We want our viewer to feel actual thirst for the product. Glycerin keeps the water droplets in place and prevents evaporation.
Once we settled on a composition, I penciled in some marks on the surface so that we can replace the subjects in the same location. We then sprayed the bottle, glass and can; filled the glass with soda from our non-hero stand ins and started shooting.
Shooting tethered allows me to make one the fly exposure assessments in Lightroom; inspecting RGB numbers taking care not to clip highlights or shadows We mainly just needed to move lights back from the diffusion flats and re-metered adjusting power to get back to our f/5.6 reading. This mitigates hot spots and gives us a much softer light on the bottle
I was hesitant to use the neon orange posterboard for a surface but it wound up working out rather well. If I had a little more time, I would have experimented with different color surfaces and background gels to achieve complimentary, split complimentary, triad or tetrad color harmonies. My research into orange soda advertisements revealed a lot of analgous and monochromatic themes. I also think I could have moved the V-Flat a little closer to the subject in order to open the shadow sides up. We shot on image with the lights turned down 1 stop so that I could mask in some darken highlights in post. We also shot a white card to bounce light through the liquid in the glass. This was done in order to mask in a little glow through the soda
My main assistant was classmate Taylor K and she did and amazing job helping to setup lights and flats. She was also great at taking my direction make final adjustments to props and the hero as I looked through the camera’s viewfinder. She also helped me get white and grey card shots.
In post-production; with LrC, I sampled a neutral value from the grey card shot to achieve a neutral white balance and sync all 3 star rated images that would be used for Photoshop editing. In PS, I used copies of the background; Layer Masked with various Camera Raw Filters, to open up the brightness of the bottle, mitigate some muddiness above the logo and get the white portions of the logo to pop. I used further layer masking to even out the blue color of the Fanta logo a little and increase saturation of the logo as well as bring up the greens in the leaf in the foreground. The -1 stop image was used to tone down the shadow side highlights on the headspace of the bottle. The white card image was used to get the soda in the glass to glow a little. I had to be restrained on this as that layer mask on 100% opacity lost a lot of detail in the soda. I also clone stamped out the lot code and expiration date printing.
While if I were to pick over this image with a fine tooth comb; I could find a lot of issues, but overall I’m very proud of this photograph. The green leaf on the right of the hero bottle creates a dark blob floating in space. I’d remove that if I were to reshoot this. Seemed like shopping for everything took longer than setting up and making the image. I found that to be the most tedious part. I would consider this to be portfolio worthy and am excited to do more shoots like this. Now to get Coca-Cola to hire me.