I haven't ever had as much luck growing tomatoes as I have this year, and I'm pretty sure it's the result of double digging, adding amendments, watering regularly, and getting the dang plants in the ground at the right time. You can see more of my garden here. Now I have my first ripe tomato of the season and need to share!
Produce looks better against a white background than a black background in my opinion. White looks fresh and clean, and fortunately, most produce shows up well against white. It also doesn't hurt to shine it up a bit.
To create the white background:
I did pretty much the exact opposite as what I did in my Instructable for creating a perfectly black background. I placed a piece of white poster board in full, harsh sunlight so that it was uniformly bright which meant angling it towards the sun against a step ladder. Then I held (or had my significant-other/upside-down-beer-glass hold) the tomato in the shade. The shade is nice and soft but still pretty bright. However, the poster board absolutely glows in comparison. The goal is to get the background uniformly brighter than the subject. You can easily get more creative with lighting and produce some better shots, but this is INCREDIBLY easy to do and requires only one light source - the sun.
To create the wet effect/shine:
I used olive oil. I've tried photographing shine/wet using water, and it really doesn't work well. Water evaporates very quickly, and it doesn't have the same "hold" as oil does. I first washed the tomato (picked fresh from the vine today!) and rubbed it down with olive oil, and a few of the shots are just with that shine alone. However, I wanted it to look wet, so I pipetted some extra oil around the top and let it drip as it pleased.
To add context:
I played with a variety of hand positions. When I held the tomato in the palm of my hand, the tomato looked bigger. When my significant other held it in the palm of his hand, it looked smaller - he was nice enough to muddy up his hands for a "fresh out of the garden, Farmer Brown" look. I also played with how my fingers were arranged, and I also propped it on an upside-down beer glass just in case the absence of hands made it a little more appealing. Minor details start to REALLY matter when the shot is minimal. Finally, when I had the shots I liked, I took a bite to see if the "fresh bite" look helped, but it didn't. All I could after that point was continue eating.
End Note:
This process is not limited to photographing produce. It can be used for a variety of other subjects.
Bon appetit and happy photographing!
Produce looks better against a white background than a black background in my opinion. White looks fresh and clean, and fortunately, most produce shows up well against white. It also doesn't hurt to shine it up a bit.
To create the white background:
I did pretty much the exact opposite as what I did in my Instructable for creating a perfectly black background. I placed a piece of white poster board in full, harsh sunlight so that it was uniformly bright which meant angling it towards the sun against a step ladder. Then I held (or had my significant-other/upside-down-beer-glass hold) the tomato in the shade. The shade is nice and soft but still pretty bright. However, the poster board absolutely glows in comparison. The goal is to get the background uniformly brighter than the subject. You can easily get more creative with lighting and produce some better shots, but this is INCREDIBLY easy to do and requires only one light source - the sun.
To create the wet effect/shine:
I used olive oil. I've tried photographing shine/wet using water, and it really doesn't work well. Water evaporates very quickly, and it doesn't have the same "hold" as oil does. I first washed the tomato (picked fresh from the vine today!) and rubbed it down with olive oil, and a few of the shots are just with that shine alone. However, I wanted it to look wet, so I pipetted some extra oil around the top and let it drip as it pleased.
To add context:
I played with a variety of hand positions. When I held the tomato in the palm of my hand, the tomato looked bigger. When my significant other held it in the palm of his hand, it looked smaller - he was nice enough to muddy up his hands for a "fresh out of the garden, Farmer Brown" look. I also played with how my fingers were arranged, and I also propped it on an upside-down beer glass just in case the absence of hands made it a little more appealing. Minor details start to REALLY matter when the shot is minimal. Finally, when I had the shots I liked, I took a bite to see if the "fresh bite" look helped, but it didn't. All I could after that point was continue eating.
End Note:
This process is not limited to photographing produce. It can be used for a variety of other subjects.
Bon appetit and happy photographing!
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There are a few pro photography tricks for making water droplets.
The most common method I know is to use glycerin, sometimes they mix it with water. Glycerin based fake sweat hurts when you glob it in your eye though (so does smoke machine fluid) so be careful. Another one is to coat the object with something that repels water so water beads up nicely, maybe something like a thin layer of vaseline or some scotchguard spray would work. Not that you'd want to eat scotchguard later. Food photography is dirty business sometimes.
A quick googling brought up these
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=277808
http://www.diyphotography.net/macro-photography-tip-spraying-flowers The usual method is to use glycerin or a mix of that and water
The tomato in the photograph is a Phoenix tomato which is apparently a good producer, and all 4 of the plants have lots of tomatoes on the vine. I have 3 other tomatoes that are nearly ready to pick. I also have 2 tomatoes on my Black Krim which is an heirloom, and it's still setting blooms. My Mortgage Lifter and Black Cherry have blooms but no fruit. The winters here are pretty short (roughly December to February). The average last day of frost is early to mid-March, and this year I pulled all my plants out of the garage in early March. I got the Phoenix tomatoes in late February in 2-3" peat pots and plugged them deep into 1 gallon nursery pots. I think they went in the ground late March, and generally, it's a race to get summer vegetables in the ground as soon as possible before it gets scorching hot and the plants stop producing blooms. It's a bit unusual that I have tomatoes this early, but these plants also have some comfy digs. As far as weather goes, temperatures have been generally good for blooms since March. Tomatoes tend to set blooms when the highs are in the 70s-80s and the lows are in the 50s-60s. We've been in the 90s quite frequently already, but there's been quite a bit of fluctuation which is the only reason why I think they're still going strong. I think this might be the year when tomatoes finally make sense to me.
so, I've been wanting clean, white backgrounds for selling earrings and such at http://www.etsy.com/?ref=si_home , now I found how to do it! The only problem I should have is finding sun. D: Here in the north west, it's very shy. ;)
i think if you spayed that on the tomato it would look better
Other food photography cheats you might find eye-opening: that's not milk in breakfast cereal adverts, it's PVA glue (milk actually looks yellowish in photos), and that delicious syrup being poured over waffles is more likely to be engine oil. Add to that the hand-glued sesame seeds on burger buns and the steam rising from microwaved wet cotton wool and the meal you actually see in photos starts to seem distinctly unappetizing!
So for food advertisements they do have to stick with the actual product being advertised (though there are always tricks there- like cutting a wedge out of the back of a burger and widening it out to make it look bigger), but other food photographers are welcome to use all the motor oil, glue and shoe polish they want.
I'd recommend testing this out for yourself in a variety of modes and looking at the EXIF (right click on the file on your hard drive and go to Properties->Details) to help figure out what happened where. It's weird tricky stuff to read about, and I didn't start understanding it until I started trying some of the stuff I've seen online and in other tutorials. It really does help to do it and then learn why it happened in my experience.
I hope that sorta helps.
Quality pictures, very nice.
L