Archive for May, 2009

Some tips for producing great food photography 0

Posted May 28, 2009

Taking a good picture of a piece of food is trickier than it seems like it should be. After all, it isn’t moving, you don’t have to convince it to smile, and odds are you like it because it tastes good. Heck, your camera might even have an entire shooting mode devoted to food. (My wife’s Olympus point and shoot does.)

So why is it that when most people try turning their photographic eye towards their entree, the pictures end up less than appetizing?

I’m a Minneapolis portrait photographer, but this year I’ve been combining my love of photography with my love of eating. It’s been a blast, and has gotten me behind the scenes for some really fun chef portrait sessions, as well as into some beautiful dining rooms for some fun food photographs. In the process I’ve identified a few basic tips that I think anyone can apply.

Tell a story.
Let’s say you’re in a restaurant. You’re eating this amazing dinner, and you decide it’s so good that you want to document it with a photo. Odds are, it’s the entire experience that’s worth documenting, not just the scallops. So instead of zooming in as tight as you can on the plate, use a wider perspective, lower the camera to the level of the table, and include some of the dining room in the frame. Including more context in a photo tells more of a story, and will produce a more effective memento.

Turn off the flash.
One of the things that makes photography in restaurants tricky is the moody (read: dim) lighting. If your camera is set to a program mode, by default it will try to help you out by triggering the built in flash. Problem is, in most situations the built in flash is. . . ugly. Flat, red eye and weird highlight producing. Not good. So turn it off! How do you get more light on your subject, you ask? Two options:

  • If you’re comfortable with having people wondering what you’re doing carrying your food across the restaurant, move it to a place with more light, like a window or underneath a pendant light.
  • Stabilize your hands by leaning in to the table and live with the longer shutter speed.

Either way, your food will look like it belongs in the dining room where you actually are, not some strange brightly-lit netherworld.

Think about what you really like about the food.
Is your steak done just right? Was the reduction sauce spooned artfully around the protein? Is the morel placed just so? Whatever it is that makes you love the dish, take a moment to appreciate it. Then experiment with the angle of the plate and place it on the table in a way that makes that element stand out. Is it a red sauce or garnish? Find a way to include something red in the background to create a repeating color element in the composition. The sheen on a tuna roll? Notice where the lights in the room reflect in the sheen and position the plate appropriately.

Talk to the chef.
If you’re like me, food is entertainment, it’s anthropology, it’s sociology. It’s one of those amazing things that defines a culture and brings it together, and chefs make it happen. They’re rock stars! Taking the time to say hello to the chef gives you insight in to why a good meal was put together the way it was. And the more you know about something, the more you can appreciate it. The more you appreciate it, the better your pictures will be.

Hungry? Please visit my blog for how I use my own tips to produce great food photography.

Blogging from Upland 0

Posted May 27, 2009

Exactly two years ago I traveled to rural Sierra Leone with a nonprofit group called the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership (SLPP). As a documentary and portrait photographer, my goal on the trip was to visually represent the group’s work providing relief to the residents of three small villages that, like most of Sierra Leone, had been almost entirely decimated by the country’s civil war in the 1990s. It was a life-changing trip, and one that I still feel fortunate to have made.

Each year a group of SLPP volunteers return to the villages to meet with residents and work together to improve their quality of life. This year’s trip is a little different: cell phone towers have gone up very close to the villages, making live blog posts possible. I’d encourage anyone to check out the SLPP blog, in particular this week while they’re in the villages, for an unfiltered sense of what it’s like to visit one of the poorest nations in the world: a complicated, but entirely enriching, experience for us members of the ‘first world.’

If you’re interested in seeing my take on Sierra Leone, please visit my Sierra Leone gallery. Also, I have a traveling exhibition of portraits from the trip entitled Made Real: Portraits from Sierra Leone that can be viewed and purchased online. All proceeds directly benefit the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership.

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Fun in the Minnesota Spring Sun 0

Posted May 5, 2009

Last Sunday was one of a few types of Perfect Minnesota day: 70 degrees, sunny, leaves budding and daffodils out. (The other types: 50 degrees and peak fall colors, 20 degrees after a nice snowfall, pretty much any time on the patio at Sea Salt Restaurant.) Not only was it phenomenal outside, but a good friend of ours turned 70, and rented out the historic streetcar station at Como Park for a potluck. There was a roving accordion player, eleven apple pies (the birthday boy’s favorite), creamed herring, hotdishes, and just a great time. Plus one of those foam gliders.

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Ahhhhhh Spring.

More at chrisbohnhoff.com, or follow me on Twitter.

The other side of professional photography 0

Posted May 1, 2009

Despite what my lack of postings the past couple weeks may suggest, I’ve been pretty busy, mostly with business-y things other than taking pictures. (Although I am doing some shooting for a story for the Carleton College Voice, among other little projects; just can’t post anything from the set until it’s published.)

Mostly I’ve been enmeshed in various marketing stuff. Moving my portfolio from agency to agency, sometimes talking to the art buyers, sometimes just leaving it to its own fate for a day or two on a conference table. Launching a Facebook ad campaign for my wedding business. Poking around Twitter. Doing a bunch of work in an effort to increase my Google page rank and tweak my site for better search engine optimization.

It’s all important stuff, and for all you small business types, you know how it is trying to drive business: completely emorphous, seemingly random, and demanding a skill set that is entirely separate from what drew you to go in to business in the first place.

So you end up becoming an expert (or at least picking up just enough knowledge to be dangerous) in all sorts of stuff that you never expected – or wanted – to know anything about. For me that’s my budding understanding of how Google ranks pages. I’m lucky to be part of an industry that does a great job of information sharing, through groups like the American Society of Media Photographers, and businesses like PhotoShelter, and the heart of the photo blog community that I’ve come to know (Chase Jarvis, Strobist, APhotoEditor to name my favorite few), all of whom have been hammering away for months on the ever-growing importance of good organic Google search results for your site. Here’s the high level view of what I’ve learned so far, and have been trying to implement wherever I can:

  • Using the keywords that you want people to find you by in your page titles is important, and the order of your words makes a difference. For example, “Chris Bohnhoff Editorial Photographer in Minneapolis” isn’t as good as “Minneapolis Editorial Photographer Chris Bohnhoff”. A little counter intuitive, but that’s what they say.
  • Packing keywords in to the meta:keywords and meta:description fields in the head section of your html code makes a small difference, but should still be done.
  • Also including keywords in photo captions, file names, and alt text fields is key.

Then there are incoming links, which apparently is 60-70% of what makes up search ranking. That means getting yourself listed in reputable online directories, blogging, commenting on others’ blogs, tweeting, being active in as many online communities as possible. (I’ve almost convinced my wife that reading blogs counts as work, but she hasn’t completely bought in yet.)

I’ve only begun this process, and I’ve got a long way to go, but that’s the deal: continuous improvement. What’s interesting to me is how Google has codified the importance of interconnectedness in setting the importance of links so high. To be a success in Google’s world you have to convince people that you have content worth linking to. Sure, you can pay to include yourself in a fake community. Or you can put in the time to forge actual connections with people online. Weird.

Like I said, I’m early in the process, so leave a comment and correct me if I’m off base, or if you have anything to add on the topics of online marketing, the experience of being a wearer of many unexpected hats, whatever. And next time I’ll get back to the pictures. . .