How I Shot This – Partially Boiled Egg
I first saw this photo on our share your food photo page. What a wonderful photo I thought. I loved the use of color in this photograph. In this post photographer Andriy explains about the concept, his gear, set up and other aspects of food photography for the food photo above.
This post is written by Andriy Zolotoiy. Andriy is portrait and food photographer based in Toronto, Canada. You can see his work at http://x-processed.ca If you would like to write about food photography or food styling, please click here.
The idea
I was playing around with idea of enhancing color contrast between the subject and background but without using any selective coloring post-processing techniques. Instead, I decided to bring out color of the subject by using fairly monochromatic props, only white and silver.
Gear
I used Nikon D300 with 50mm 1.8 lens to take this photo. 50mm is my favorite lens for food shots on cropped image sensor. For lighting I used SB-600 flash controlled via built-in remote commander. Camera was set on tripod and slightly tilted, the result looked a bit more interesting than straight on shot.
Setup
Food preparation was very simple here. The egg was boiled for about 1 minute so that yoke remained liquid but gained more of orange color.
At the time I was trying to use more natural light but that particular day was very dull and available light was very diffused which didn’t work for the contrasty look of the image I wanted to create. So I decided to kill most of ambient by going to 1/250 sec. shutter speed. Aperture was set f/2.5 to give nice separation between subject and background.
I used one speedlite at 1/32 power with 15×15 softbox slightly behind and to the left of the scene. Flash was placed about 4-5 feet away from the scene to harden the shadows and silver reflector was set on the camera right to open them a little.
When I took first test shot white balance was set to Daylight instead of Flash by accident. This produced slightly cooler tones overall but didn’t affect enough the egg itself. I liked overall look and kept WB on Daylight for the rest of the shoot.
Post-processing
The only adjustment I’ve done in Capture NX is I added some contrast with S-curve.
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Thank you Andriy for this wonderful post and explanation. You can see his work at http://x-processed.ca
Your Thoughts??
What did you think about the photo? Please let Andriy know by visiting his website or by leaving a comment for him below. Have a questions about this set-up or photograph itself, please leave a comment below.
To share your photos with us, go to share your food photo page.
All photos copyright of Andriy Zolotoiy.
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Thank you for this mini-tutorial. You gave us plenty of details to work with. I appreciate photographers who share their knowledge and tricks to help the rest of us still learning.
I am still flabbergasted that the white balance affected tableware but not the egg. I think it might be thata a bit more ambient is on the egg itself. But it is beautiful image, thanks for sharing the insight.
White balance affects whole image but shift in color is just more visible in neutrals. So if you want to give whites blue tint you need to shift color temperature by 100K but in order for brown to become blue, shift has to be 2000K (I made up this number just for illustration). Hope this explains
Great photo and great post.
Thanks Miriam
Hi Andriy.
Love the egg shot. I’m very interested in food photography and trying to put together enough shots to set up a reasonable website portfolio. You’ve got everything in your shot that I personally like. Good depth of field, crop, subject and clean fresh look to your image. Thanks for the information on setting it up, lighting etc. I’ll try it myself and hope it works as well as yours. My web address, attached is only for my illustration portfolio.
Great post! I also love the cooler hues, it really helps to contrast the yellow yolk! This was super helpful, thanks so much for sharing!
Great post, very helpful. Going to try this out at home.
Marisa,
Once you try this, don’t forget to share it with us here. Thanks.
Glad I stumbled upon your blog. I am a hobbyist photographer and food photography is one area I have a keen interest. Great pic of the egg. I have trouble getting nice photos with all-white props. Guess that has very much to do with lightings and use of a softbox isn’t?
Yes, whites present exposure problem because you don’t want them overblown but they should still look bright. It’s all about light control in the end no matter whether you use softbox, umbrella or just a bounce card
Iza is right, it does appear to be post processed to some extend. Otherwise the difference in white balances (plate & egg white) is not explainable.
Even if you pull the flash card and use flash color filters on top of available light, it would render both objects on the same plane the same color tone.
It’s even pretty obvious.
Ben,
In grand scheme of things and the “art” of photography, does it really matter if the white balance is changed for egg white versus plate? In my opinion the vision and how to achieve it is more important. Now, there are some landscape photographers that change the entire image (by adding sky from some other image in post processing and other tricks), personally I will not do that and am not recommending we achieve the vision by hook or crook.
I think in old days (days of film) some of these things (color correction, brightness contrast adjustments etc.) were done in darkroom. So, some post processing that is done today is no different that darkroom days.
What do you think?
Haha, it’s easter and I’ll follow your tutorial to shoot easter eggs.
thank you.
Good job on this photos. It’s always been some experimentation and trials and errors to make a masterpiece. It is not a one shot one kill affair. Keep on going!
Lovely photo indeed, the colors are extremely vibrant and inviting.
Another great post, this stuff is driving home the knowledge that planning is critical in all you do in this regard. Thanx again, I love soft-boiled eggs. I might try this?