Kitchen Magazine

K I T C H E N

Y O U R E D I T O R

JODIE GREEN

My name is Jodie Green and i am a photographer

Once i have finished my university course in Digital Design and Media, I will be operating on a freelance basis specialising in event photography, as well as product photography and advertising, branding and marketing I am currently a first year student on a two year level 4 undergraduate course, focusing on Digital Photography, but i have had the opportunity on this course to experiment with Media and Digital Graphics

My love for photography has been budding for many years, but up until recently I did not have the confidence to turn it into a career. Until I realised I could spend my life wondering about it or give it a good go, so here I am

My goals as a professional photographer vary, but my main passion is food and product photography as I really enjoy the creativity of it and food is my lifelong passion alongside photography, and being able to combine those will be a dream come true

THE RECIPE

Our main spread this month focusing on studio lighting with gorgeous cover model Tasha Jobbins.

16

RECIPE OF THE MONTH

This month were in Japan for our all time favourite curry

20

KNOW YOUR NOODLES

From rice noodles to egg noodles, learn how to pair your noodle.

24

ASIAS HOTSPOTS

R E C I P E T H E

Studio photography is an art and to be an artist in studio work you must first learn the tools for the job, and your main tool will be lighting. Lighting is a key factor in creating a successful image, so it its necessary to control and manipulate light correctly in order to achieve your images

As the light source impacts everything in your image from the character, the mood and the story you’re trying to tell, being familiar with how to modify your light to set the tone or scene is of most importance.

Once you understand light and have learned how to harness your light source in the most effective way for any given composition and project, you’ll be able to create a wide variety of creative and effective images.

Indoors or outdoors, light is your source that makes the difference, the difference with outdoors is you can't control the sun or the sky, so think of indoor lighting as your own personal sun that you have complete control over.

Generally, when shooting indoors, you use a variety of lights and when shooting outdoors for landscape photography or ever location portraits, you have only one light available, the sun. However, most photographers now use lighting set ups outside too when shooting portraits to capture back that control over the light Both artificial and natural lighting can be manipulated to create any number of styles of lighting, but only if you know how to use them.

So, it is necessary to control and manipulate light correctly in order to get the best texture, vibrancy of colour, and luminosity on your subjects

Throughout this article I will explain the variety of lighting set ups and techniques that helped me achieve my outcome.

HOW I ACHIEVED MY OUTCOME

Over the last few months, I have participated in several different studiobased workshops to learn the fundamentals of studio lighting and portrait photography.

A good studio set up involves the use of various lights like soft boxes used as key lights, backlights, and fill lights The larger the soft box the more diffused the light is and smaller ones are usually more direct with their light. There are also options to add or diffuse lights like using hair lights which have a snoot on them, also known as kickers, which give you a beam of light to catch the hair or face of your subject, using grids over your soft box to diffuse, or using various styles of reflector's to bounce light towards your subject.

A really great workshop session I participated in focused on the different techniques of lighting used in portraiture; like Rembrandt, Split and Butterfly lighting, which are all created using one or two key lights in various positions or angles. My favourite of the techniques was Rembrandt due to the moody cinematic style

This was extremely valuable towards my model shoot as lighting played a key part in the tone and mood of my images. There are also two main lighting set ups; Low-key and High-key

High key lighting is very bright and vibrant paired with a light or white background to reflect or bounce light and can use up to four key lights

Low key lighting is generally used for a more creative approach to portraits, using a dark background and highlighting the key areas of subject with just the use of one or two key lights Again this was helpful for me to learn because I was aiming for a dark moody tone to my images, so I now knew the style of lighting and the technique needed to create them. Participating in these workshops gave me the knowledge needed to create the composition i wanted. After holding a test shoot with a classmate I was fully prepared with what equipment and settings i needed to proceed. I now had a plan set in motion, to create my final images using low key lighting with the depth of Rembrandt.

On the day of the shoot I used the Canon 6D camera paired with an 18-55mm zoom lens, which has a variable focal length. My camera settings were set to 100 ISO, Aperture of F18 and 1/180 Shutter Speed. I made sure the file format was set to Raw so could have a higher resolution image for the postprocessing stage in Lightroom Classic.

These settings together allowed for low light sensitivity through the camera as I was using a key light with flash trigger, and I had the Aperture set to F18 to let little light into the camera as my SS was just right to capture small motion and let in a small portion of light. There is no need to have the ISO any higher in the studio because you have lighting and you can control the SS

I knew from my test shoot that i only wanted one key light and maybe a hair light for an extra burst of light. so I started setting these up.

I used one studio flashlight with the large octagonal soft box as a key light, and had this positioned directly above facing my model.

I paired this with a hair light with a snoot so I could light up more areas at the back of my model as and when I needed I needed to connect the camera to the light to synchronise the flash, and to do this I used an Interfit transmitter attached to the hot shoe of the camera, which then triggers the flash when I take a photo

My model arrived in the studio and I positioned her in the middle of the studio backdrop while I proceeded to set the lights in the right positions and ran some test shots while I did this until I was happy with my positioning

I had already purchased my sushi directly from Sushi King prior to the shoot so it was fresh and vibrant ,as my goal was to highlight the vibrant colours of the food for my food based magazine I set it up on various chopping boards and bamboo mats with chopsticks and arranged it around my model. As previously discussed we went through various poses and outfit changes during our photoshoot and I adjusted the lights throughout to the level if my subject and model. I was really pleased with my final images when looking through them on camera and the final stage was to edit them

For the post-processing stage I took my SD card home and slotted it into my MacBook and then loaded them into Lightroom Classic in a new catalog. I was really happy with how the raw images looked so I needed to do minimal editing. I selected my favourite images that i wanted to use for my magazine and added them into a new collection. I started off by raising the whites and highlights while lowering the blacks and shadows slightly so that my images were brighter while still holding the dark moody tone. I adjusted the mid-tones slightly to balance this out too. For the colour grading I wanted to highlight the vibrant colours of the sushi so I selected each colour individually and raised the luminance and saturation to make the colours pop out more. Finally I lowered the texture and clarity ever so slightly just to give a slight more smoothness

For the second shoot of the sushi alone I used the smaller white backdrop and one key light I wanted to aim for brighter lighter images to contrast with my models images I followed the same procedures in post processing as before as I was happy with the quality of images i just re touched and colour graded to give them that extra resolution

Yeovil Sushi King

01935 479 225 www.sushiking.uk