Showing Beauty Of Raw Produce
After a cold and usually gloomy winter comes spring, which showers us with warmth and colours. The nature gives us the most amazing array of fruits and veggies of different colours, shapes and sizes.
This is a period of the year, when I enjoy all the fresh produce offered at open-air markets. It gives me an opportunity to showcase fruits and veggies, which would usually go unnoticed. Not only do I put them in front of my camera, but being so fresh I can use whole plants in my meals.
Yet, apart from the versatility of fruits and veggies, what happens in spring is that days get longer and there are more options of using natural light in food photography. I am lucky that the space where I photograph looks to the north, so the light is subtle and well diffused, which gets even better on cloudy days. And I can shape it well, to get what I want in my photos.
So, one of my favourite subjects to shoot in the spring are carrots. In the photo you
can see carrots, which we cannot really call beautiful in real life, but with the play of
side light, highlighting their texture and colour (gorgeous combination of earthly
colours which on the colour wheel together with yellow form analogous colour
scheme) I managed to present them as different, as bold and as beautiful. In post-
production I added vignette to highlight them a bit more.
Canon EOS R, Canon 50 mm EF f 1.8/
The other favourite subject I like to take photos of are strawberries. They are the
nature’s example of complementary colours in colour theory – namely green and red.
They offer numerous options for a food photographer, but in this photo I decided to
show their texture and to highlight the colours. I used natural light, in this particular
case backlight, but I only let it fall on the fruits closest to my lens. In this way I
managed to emphasise their gorgeous texture.
Canon EOS R,Canon 100 mm macro EF
f/2.8L IS USM/
And when it comes to the angle of shooting, I prefer the flatlay or shooting at 90°, as
this gives me an opportunity to go for what I want to show. In the photo of carrots I
aimed at the difference of shapes, so I used my nifty-fifty for it. While in the photo of
strawberries, I aimed at the texture, so I used my macro lens to show it.Finally, I can say that as nature wakes up in spring, so does our creative spirit as it is
stimulated by everything that is blooming around it. Therefore, it starts blooming, too.
Alica Bjeli
Croatia
@okruglica79