Food macrophotography

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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Rylee Isitt
Posts: 476
Joined: Fri Apr 13, 2012 3:54 pm
Location: Canada
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Food macrophotography

Post by Rylee Isitt »

This is not my usual subject matter, but this project has been on my mind for a while. I’m still working on it but these are my first four images. One of my hobbies is making curries from whole spices, so I have a large selection of spices. I plan to print off a collection of these images, and hang them somewhere in/around the kitchen.

This was an educational process for me as I had to depart from my usual bag of lighting tricks which didn’t work at all in these cases. My usually approach of “diffuse as much as possible” created such even illumination that the subjects were flat and boring. Really, "boring" is an understatement of what it looked like. This required directional lighting which I haven’t used much for macrophotography, until now. What a difference it made.

Putting subjects directly on colorful, textured backdrops also creates challenges. First, the colors of the subject and backdrop influence each other. This is just the way it is and the key to reducing this (if you want to) is to use backdrops that are not particularly saturated, like neutrals and pastels.

I recommend paint chips, card stock, and hand-painted backdrops for this kind of work. Paint chips have the most subtle texture (see the image of the crushed chllies). Hand-painted backdrops can be made with a brush and multiple coats of watered-down acrylic paint. Keep in mind that the texture of the surface you are painting matters. I found flat porcelain discs at a craft store (meant for making painted coasters, I think) have nice texture. Brush strokes are visible but not overly so. Card stock tends to have very pronounced texture. High-key lighting and a light backdrop will reduce the appearance of texture (see the white pepper, it was shot against card stock).

I had to add a levelling base to my rig to angle the camera downwards towards the backdrop so that I could get a steeper angle between camera and subject. I used a Sunwayfoto DYH-90 which has nice build quality. I also have a goniometer on my subject holder, so with the two in concert I can get about a 30 degree angle of the camera relative to the backdrop.

I borrowed some lighting tricks from Light: Science and Magic (a great book), specifically the chapter on table-top lighting. That includes placing the main light above and slightly behind the subject, tilted towards the camera to get a falloff effect on the backdrop and a shadow under and slightly in front of the subject. My light sources were a pair of square LED panels, with a 2x ND gel on the side/fill light. They don’t produce accurate color out of the box since LEDs have a very uneven spectrum, so I used a Color Checker to profile the combination of camera+LED panels. Doing so drastically improves the colors in my opinion.

These are all fairly deep stacks, between 3 and 6 mm and 100-200 slices. They were assembled in Zerene Stacker and retouched in Photoshop. Most of the detail is from DMAP but I used PMAX output to clean up edges, shadows, valleys, and ridges… places where DMAP often goes awry. I applied noise reduction using custom camera profiles in Neat Image to each slice, which prevents PMAX from getting too grainy. I used a nice trick for making PMAX’s contrast changes nearly disappear. Enable the “unrestricted dynamic range” options and then use Photoshop’s “match color” feature to match the PMAX output to your DMAP output. This works very well.

I also took high-DOF shots with the smallest aperture I could get (F/16 on the MP-E 65) at both the near and far slice positions of the stack. These were used to get a gradual shift to an out-of-focus backdrop instead of a sudden cut-off. The high-DOF shots were just treated like normal slices, numbered so that they appeared in the proper sequence. But I excluded them from DMAP since they seem to cause the algorithm some problems.

The last trick was taking one shot with the subject completely removed, at the far slice position after stacking was done, to photograph the backdrop only. This was used to help remove haloes around edges. It’s not a perfect solution but it does help quite a bit.

So that’s the procedure I used for all four of these images. They may not be the most spectacular of subjects but the techniques will be transferrable to much more photogenic things, no doubt!

Crushed Chillies:
Image

Black Pepper:
Image

Fennel Seed:
Image

Muntok White Pepper. Very subtle texture because of light backdrop and high-key lighting (kills most of the backdrop detail):
Image

Finally, a screen shot showing the general use of the various shots and output images from Zerene in putting together the final image:

Image

pontop
Posts: 83
Joined: Wed Dec 18, 2013 4:00 am
Location: Uppsala, Sweden

Post by pontop »

Very nice pictures. I like your choises of background color. Not shure what a paint chip is - is it the little color sample cards you get at the paint store?

/Bo

Rylee Isitt
Posts: 476
Joined: Fri Apr 13, 2012 3:54 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Post by Rylee Isitt »

Thanks!

Yup, those paint sample cards are what I mean. The ones that have multiple swatches per card are a bit small, but some of them are large enough for work around 1x.

The nice thing is they are free, the paint is evenly applied and matte, and there are a large selection of neutrals and pastels which is what I've been using the most of.

But sometimes a different texture is nice. For example, the fibers you can see in the backdrop for the black pepper image... I think they really add to the image by making it look almost like a landscape... a boulder sitting on cracked mud.

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