Photo Gauntlet

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Gauntlet: Flat Looking Pie

by Gary Fong
Photographer: Andrew Smith, www.visualrealia.com

Shoofly Pie 

 
How can anyone have two planes of focus in one image? What is physically impossible opens up speculation that Photoshop imagineers applied their creative layers to a simple pie shoot.
 
At first glace, Andrew Smith’s Shoofly Pie (top), looks odd. We don’t exactly know why it looks odd…but it does. Maybe it’s that green fly spec on the crust…but it just looks odd.
 
Ah…why are their two areas of sharpness? Usually one plane of focus would produce one area of sharpness. But Smith’s (no relation to Mrs. Smith’s Pies) has two areas that draw attention, with a focus mush causing my eyes to strain.
 
The optical illusion is cause by a very shallow plane of focus on a deep undulating piecrust. The divot in the crust falls out of focus in the background, while maintain the sharpness at the crest (not to be confused with “crust”).
 

 

Now for the Nit Picking

 
There’s nothing worse than flat light on an undulating piecrust. An on camera flash produces two-dimensional flat looking images. In the case of the undulating piecrust, it created a distracting selective focus mush that raised more questions, rather than illuminating the texture in the subject.
 
Food photos are all about making it look good enough to eat off the page. Without texture, one has a flat pie lacking a salivation quality. Chocolate CakeBaker's TartNoted extraordinary food photographer Craig Lee, loves “raking” light across his morsels subjects (two photos on right). He produces textures with light coming from behind or at extreme angles to the food.
 
Try off camera lighting. Take the strobe off the camera and fire it by remote. Look for other light sources that may provide an interesting sidelight. You may also try adjusting the aperture to provide a greater depth of field.
 
If you’re lost in suggestions, forget what I mentioned above and read on.
 
Two photographers were talking about Algebra as a foreign language. One guy says to the other, “say something in Algebra.” The other photog thought for a moment, then says, “Pi R squared”. “Ah ha…wrong wrong wrong!!,” said the other. “Pie are ROUND….cornbread are square.”

 

Gauntlet: Be Aware of Cool Shade

 

By Gary Fong
 
 
Figure 1 - BeforeFigure 2 - After
 
 
To the eye, white is white. To the camera, white is yellow under tungsten, green under florescent light, and blue under in open shade with camera settings on daylight.
 
Most people don’t “see” the shades of white in real life, but notice it when viewing a print or computer screen. To the viewer’s eye and brain, “if it’s supposed to be white, it is”, therefore the brain sees it as “white”.
 
 
Now for the Nit Picking
 
If angelic beings are traditionally seen as white…the brain will see it as white. But in the (Fig 1), it’s blue because of the open shade. Yes…moving the subject away from harsh daylight is what many photographers do to soften the features. But moving the subject from a daylight-balanced area into open shade miss-matched the Kelvin temperature.  Therefore, the scene turned a bit blue.
 
Although open shade light is soft, the neutral colors lean to the cooler side of the Kelvin scale, thus, the blue. The solution is the set the white color balance to the correct mode. “Cloud” or “Shade” mode is good for most overcast days or open shade. It warms up the whites to neutral.
 
If the image is already shot, Photoshop may be an easy solution in post processing. One must be a master at the “lab” side of photography, as well as the camera side.
 
Open the image in Photoshop. Open Levels (Image/Adjustments/Levels). Look for the White Eye Drop tool. Use it to click the lightest white on the angle’s costume. If done correctly, the “white” should be a closer balance to neutral, showing a textured white, (Fig 2).
 
However, if the photo was converted to B&W…white could be gray…which is a different conversation all together. If it’s going to be gray…let it be a textured gray with a pure white on the image somewhere. In the B&W mode, one doesn’t worry about color balance…cause B&W images are shades of gray.
 
Whatever the case, understand that white to the eye, is not necessarily white to the camera.
 
 

Gauntlet: Making Crooked Straight

 

By Gary Fong
 
Figure 1Figure 2
 
 
Objects made by man should be straight.  Objects made by Nature can be crooked.
 
 
Now for the Nit Picking
 
Falling walls seem to be at epidemic levels with wide-angle lenses. When shooting a building, architects like to have the walls appear straight up and down, rather than falling backwards.  Interior rooms are affected likewise. It’s usually a planned design element.
 
The solution “before” the shoot…is to keep the film plane (or digital image chip plane) in parallel with the building wall plane. If it looks straight in the viewfinder, it’s probably close enough. Getting up on a higher point of reference (a second floor of another building) would also help to straighten the film plane.
 
Some photographers back up with longer lenses (longer than 50mm) to keeping the film plane parallel.
 
The solution “after” the shoot…is using Photoshop to make the perspective correction.  However, when making the adjustment, one needs to have extra image space around the building to accommodate the scrunch factor, (figure 2).  Therefore, shoot very lose around the building.
 
If one has a choice of solutions…shooting it correct in the first place is better than fixing it after the fact.