Photo Recipe

Today we have a short one, bringing together my two great loves: food and photography. In fact, this very blog had started with a food-photography post I put up almost four years ago!

This time I wanted to participate in a photographic-recipe contest arranged by the student body at my institute. I don't know if the contest ever did happen or if I just missed the deadline, but I was making food one day and decided to document some of the process.

It took me twice as long to make the damn thing because I had to stop and fidget with the flash for some of these shots... but once the food was cooking I didn't have that much time for setting it up just right, and when it was ready I wasn't thinking about the pictures anymore - I was way too hungry!

A list of ingredients + instructions after the break...

Living Statues 2015

Like every year I find myself coming back to the Rehovot living statues festival. Being my hometown it is convenient to come visit and go have a look at this year's statues with my folks.

So this festival was in July, and just like the last few times, I came ready with a flash pole, and got the most drama out of these nightshots as I could.

I like to compare the new innovations to the statues from previous years, particularly when I can recognize some of the performers and see how they come up with new costumes each year. I can maybe even see my own work improving from year to year... but I leave that for you to decide.

Brides and Beach

So last summer we did our second bridal photo-shoot (the first one here),  this time on the beach of Caesarea. I had been contacted by make up artist Danit, that already had the wedding gown vendors and the location chosen. We only needed to find two models, which led us to the beautiful Maria and Karina that star in this post. I had also contacted my friend Yael to video the whole shoot.

The schedule for the shoot was clear. We arrive at 16:00 at Danit's house, and begin makeup and hair on the two models in parallel, switch them, and then drive 15 minutes to Caesarea beach to be there at 17:00, with plenty of time to spare before magic hour. In practice, everyone was late (there was horrible traffic), getting ready took longer than I thought, and we had ended up arriving at the location less than half an hour before sunset. So we scrambled, we skipped over some things and went straight for the money shot.

Studio Sessions - Adi

 After a few non-fashion posts I decided to jump back a bit to my first (and so far only) studio session. I had been collaborating again with Zoe from Swans Moda and this time we shot in her studio/basement. You may recall our beach shoot from the year before, or the urban winter shoot.

The model for this shoot is the beautiful, not-yet-even-eighteen Adi Hashamonai, who made things very easy for me as she both knew how to work the camera angles and looked amazing in anything we put on her. 

The studio setup was pretty simple. A white fabric with two constant lights in soft-boxes to burn it out, another constant soft-box as fill from the left, and my flash in a fourth soft-box as key. Then I alternated between the 105mm for closeups and the 50mm for full body and medium shots, as I didn't have enough room to back up to use only the long lens for everything. 

Princess Jewels

After all the fashion and portrait work I've been doing recently, I found that product photography had way more paying customers... this shouldn't be a surprise I guess. 

But I actually really like taking product shots. It's technical, there are well-known rules to getting it right, and with a little practice and fairly basic gear you can get surprisingly good results. 

So I had gotten some work to go and take pictures in a jewelry shop in Rishon LeZion. I knew I was going to use flashes and a macro lens, and I knew the products won't be too large. So in addition to getting the lightstand and umbrella, I also made an impromptu light tent from a coca cola six pack cardboard box and some baking sheets. This looked really ridiculous, and I would not recommend this just because it will make your clients think you're a real hack... but the light inside this contraption was pretty sweet. If you look on the left you can see the shape of the three cutouts where the light comes into the box, and the dark rectangle where the camera comes in.

New York City 2015

This time around in New York City, I was going to focus mainly on the people. On my first trip to New York I was overwhelmed by the towering skyscrapers and parks and neighborhoods and I didn't really take many portraits. Two years later, I had already realized that travel (or landscape) photos are almost always more interesting with people in them... 

Very early in this four-day stay I had purchased a new 50 mm lens, this time at f/1.4 (refurbished or used I don't remember). That didn't seem like much of a step up from my older f/1.8 lens, on paper at least, but in reality, the quality gap was pretty big. This new lens gave stunning results, and could be opened up to f/2 before getting soft. My old $100 lens could barely stay sharp at 2.8, and at those apertures, every stop counts. I was also carrying around my trusty 105 macro and the Tokina 11-16 ultra-wide, a DX lens that's also FX "compatible" so that zoomed-in the dark corners were pretty small and could easily be cropped out. That's what you get for going to full-frame before having enough money to buy a full set of new lenses. 

Madison (why I love my new Nikon)

I haven't been uploading recently, and there's a ton of new stuff waiting to come up to this blog. I hope I will get it pretty much in order, and anyway, it's better late than never.

So, going back to May 2015 I had flown to Wisconsin for a conference and some work with the collaboration I was part of. Like every trip abroad this is a chance to see and photograph new sceneries and people, and to act like a tourist and take pictures of absolutely everything.

This was my first chance to try out my new Nikon D610, which performed beautifully and, even though I still love my old D90, did let me do some new things I couldn't get away with using the old technology and crop sensor...

So just a small selection of images from the lovely Madison, WI. If you like this kind of thing, I will link to a few facebook albums with some more images.