Some food pictures

[snousle]

These photos were taken using the new lighting setup. This begins the "shortlist" of photos that will be used for the web page. This also represents the limits of my abilities so far, both in presentation and actual photography. Photographic suggestions would be welcome, since I have a sense that these could be further improved, but other than some focus issues I'm not sure exactly what's wrong. (I don't know about the wide-aperture approach, it's starting to annoy me more than please me, but I see it in magazines all the time.)



Uncooked squash agnolotti:



...with some beurre blanc, caramelized shallots, and parsley. This, or something like it, is going to be one of my standards, since it's popular, vegetarian, and not very difficult to make.



I'm unsure whether this faux-grungy-antique plate is going to work. It's from a set my mother gave me a few years back. Would you want to eat off of that?

Another presentation:



Some pork and zucchini with said agnolotti. This particular arrangement is not actually something I would serve, but it illustrates some difficulties I'm having with color. Things in the red range look indistinct and washed out, while the zucchini is so dark as to lose all detail.



A presentation I'm thinking of for a "tapas party" where many small plates are served and shared:

Comments

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I definitely need to calibrate the white. For now I'm going to stick with the white background. I'm also wondering if I need to start working in raw mode so as to avoid that problem entirely. Know of any free software that handles raw D70 images well?

People usually resize web images to 72 DPI.

??? I wasn't aware that my images include any resolution information at all. Can you elaborate?

I've been looking at Charlie Trotter's food photography and I see that he's almost always cropping so close that you don't even see the boundaries of the plate. Not sure I want to imitate that style but it's another way of tackling the problem.

Thanks for the pointers, they are quite useful!

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

These are all at 300 dpi, which is probably what comes out of your camera.

Surely you know someone who has a copy of Photoshop?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Is this having an effect on how you see them?

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

What browsers do with it is unpredictable, for instance in Firefox it breaks your LJ style but Safari politely resizes them to fit their container. This will be important to you when you start using them on your website.