Hello Friday

I have been exploring more of my new neighbourhood lately. I love all the wonderful colours of summer here in Sydney.

I have also spent a lot of time walking along the beach in the early evening enjoying the beautiful light and warm rays.

There is a real summer feel now, the temperature is about 28 degrees most days and the nights are balmy and full of the sounds of cicadas. It feels good to be warm and by the sea at this time of year. I am linking up with Friday Finds over at Kim Klassen's cafe today, do pop over at have a look.

On food photography

I had a busy Sunday morning yesterday, I attended a one hour talk on food photography. It was a fascinating talk presented by a stylist and two photographers and I thought I would share with you some of the tips they passed on as they styled, presented and photographed a plate of smoked salmon with various accoutrements on the side .

• Always use good quality ingredients.
• Everything has to shine, onions need to be golden, tomatoes need to be bright, you can add oil to the ingredients to make them shine. 
• Get as many backdrops as you can from various sources - council clean ups, charity shops, wallpaper makes a great backdrop on a table.
• Contrast - use warm and cold colours together.
• If you light from behind it will bring out the textures of the food.
• If you are making salads use a shallow bowl and pile up the ingredients to create height.
• Undercook your vegetables to bring out the colour.
• Use a mandolin to cut and slice stuff as food looks much better cut this way.
• If your lettuce or rocket looks tired place it in a bowl with a stainless steel knife and it will spring back to life. 
• Do portrait shots, not landscape shots.
• You want the viewer to feel like they are there sharing the food so use a crushed napkin, not a folded one.
• Think of where you are sitting at the table, you want to put the camera at that angle.
• Decide if you want shallow depth of field (I did) or all in focus and adjust your aperture or lens according. I shot the above using my 50mm F1.4 lens with an ISO of 125 at F1.8 and 1/100 sec using natural light.

I thought I would practise over the next few weeks with the build up to Christmas, who wants to join me?

Lately

Lately I have been taking a lot of pictures, carrying around my dslr and making the effort to shoot every day. I must confess I don't miss instagram at all, I thought I would but I realised it was making me a bit lazy, a quite snap, edit, upload, obsess about 'likes'. I am enjoying taking pictures for the diptychs I am doing with Leanne over here. We have been sending each other pictures based on a theme then we match them up, it is great fun, I highly recommend it if you feel in a bit of a rut with your photography. You can easily make a diptych using pic monkey, I am finding it really hard to shoot in portrait so I just adapt my landscape shots, I know a lot of people only shoot in portrait for a diptych but hey, isn't photography all about breaking rules too?