Las Vegas Food Photographer

THE BACKSTORY

For many years now, I've been deeply involved with the food & beverage and hospitality industry in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas, so my knowledge and insight into the marketing aspect of the business is well versed. During those years, I had the good fortune to work for some of the top chefs of our time including Kerry Simon, Charlie Palmer, Michael Mina, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Tom Colicchio, to name a few. I had access to photographing some of the greatest culinary creations from the best and brightest!

Food photography is an art form incorporating meticulous composition, specialized optics, advanced high-resolution camera image sensors, quality studio lighting, complicated post-editing techniques and of course the love for the epicurean fair. Too often, I see images in print and social media that fail to replicate a chef's unique creation, as it was intended to be seen. Capturing great culinary adventures is rather effortless with the proper equipment, years of experience and a little passion.

FOOD & COCKTAIL PHOTOGRPAHY LIGHTING

Proper lighting and balance are imperative. There are so many critical elements in producing great food photography images and lighting is certainly key. The human brain, with the aid of the eyes as its sensors, has the ability to quickly switch between viewable details in the shadows and details in the brightly lit areas. This is known as dynamic range. Humans possess the ability to see thirty-stops of light. In comparison, even the best professional cameras on the market can only capture twelve stops of light. This leaves nine-stops of light off each end that will be both too dark and overexposed. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography consists of taking multiple exposures with varying exposure latitudes and relying on software to best guess how each pixel should be illuminated. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. Perhaps in the years to come, with the assistance of AI technology, we’ll arrive. This is why it’s critical to properly light your product and control the shadows and highlights. The number of pixels a camera’s sensor has will certainly provide great detail for post-editing but will not solve the dynamic range challenge.

So how do you light food and cocktails? This can get very tricky because you are dealing with curved glassware, glossy flatware, highly polished silverware and multi-faceted food textures that all want to kick harsh and blown-out reflective light back at the camera's sensor. Properly positioned key lights, kicker & pepper lights, with softboxes, bounce cards, diffusers and snoots will aid in capturing exemplary images for editing.

THE BEST LENS FOR FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY

My preferred focal length for food photography has always been the 100mm lens. The longer focal length provides incredible sharpness and the desired depth of field to bring the background out-of-focus; I prefer your eye being forced to the product and not distracted by elements in the background. The days of wide-angle food photography, where you show the food in the whole of its space, is passé. If you want to show the venue take an architectural image. Also, consider the vast majority of customers today will be viewing a small image on their smartphones, so getting close to the food details is best practice.

Some prefer using a 50mm lens, but I find that optic a tad wide and less desirable for its deeper depth-of-field. Yes, you can open the iris to compensate for that, but then the image’s sharpness is affected - the wider the aperture the softer the image’s corners will be. When the 100mm’s DOF takes too much out of focus, rack-focusing followed by focus-stacking in Photoshop is your resolve. Yes, time consuming but delivers beautiful images.

POST PROCESSING AND EDITING RAW IMAGE FILES

RAW vs JPG files

A RAW image file contains all the uncompressed information for every pixel to include the tonal range and color space. This excessively rich information is critical when editing to get the color and balance just right. Once an image is finalized in the editing process, on a properly calibrated high-resolution monitor, it is then compressed to a JPG file for sharing and media use. A RAW file, once edited, will look no different than a compressed JPG file. However, for archiving purposes all of my images are stored as RAW files - should I ever want to revisit the images later on. Yes, you can further edit a compressed JPG file, but it’s like scanning and old photograph versus scanning the original camera negative … information gets lost in translation, so best to source the original. In short, shooting in RAW provides far greater latitude for post processing or "Photoshopping". Virtually all professional digital images get the post-production editing treatment. Similarly, this is why audiophiles, or true music aficionados, will only listen to traditional record vinyl opposed to an Mp3 audio file; you simply loose a tremendous amount of information when a file is compressed for storage space reasons. It's far greater than nuanced.

• Camera Bodies: Canon ○ Leica ○ Hasselblad

• Canon Lenses: 14mm ○ 35mm ○ 85mm ○ 100mm
• Leica Lenses: Summicron M 35mm ASPH ƒ/2 ○ Summaron 35mm ƒ/3.5 ○ Tele-Elmarit 90mm ƒ2.8
• Zeiss Lenses: Plannar 80mm ƒ/2.8 ○ Distagon 50mm ƒ/4

• Lighting Packages: Hensel Strobes ○ Continuous Sources: Kino Flo Divas & Arri Plus

• Modifiers: Chimera Sofboxes ○ Westcott Parabolics

• Post Processing: iMac 27in. 3.7GHz Quad Core Intel I7 ○ Adobe ○ Capture One Pro Software

• Downstairs Loft Creative, LLC
• State Cert. C20140407-3510
• City Lic. Bus. ID 97431
• Certificate of Insurance available upon request.