Shadows and Bread.

The week has started and it's started well. I've cleaned up my studio in anticipation of an assignment that starts at noon tomorrow. Portraits. New people. One of my favorite subjects to photograph. Making my daily "bread." I've got the lighting set up already and I've tested it. I wanted to shoot the portraits with the new fluorescent lights but I've only received one and the background light doesn't arrive until Weds. (I'm so cheap, I went with the free shipping). I'm shooting with flash instead.

I've set up a Elinchrom monolight with a 60 inch Softlighter 2 as my main light. I'm using a second Elinchrom through a small 20 by 30 inch softbox on the grey paper background and another monolight into a 20 inch beauty dish, covered with diffusion, for a hair and back light. The fill is just a big, white flex reflector. I'm thinking broad and modern.

Don't know what it is about the bread shot above that I like. Maybe it's the very defined shadow against the bread and maybe it's just the look of the bread itself. Either way it's like trying to dissect a joke. When broken into its pieces it all falls apart.

Sony a850 with the nasty, old 24-105 Sony lens. I like those two pieces of gear precisely because they are NOT perfect.

Remember how cool it felt the first time you made a website?

http://kirktuck.500px.com/food_and_restaurant/

http://kirktuck.500px.com/food_and_restaurant/

We made our first website in 1998 and, of course, everything had to be hand coded. Bandwidth sucked back then so we had to make sure that every image was a tiny little jpeg that would open quickly. Once you had everything the way you wanted it on your machine you lived through various levels of agony every time you saw your site on someone else's hardware. If they weren't using the same browser that you optimized for the elements of your crafty site ended up all over the place and the type got replaced by some goo type that made your design look like crap.

Now you can just hop on the web with a bucket of images and make a quick web portfolio to share in minutes. When I finish shooting something fun I hop over to 500px and add to a gallery or build a new one. I can send the links out to potential clients pretty darn quickly.

With blogs and portfolio sites everywhere I think the traditional sturm und drang of creating a masterful website has been tamped down. Most clients just want to see the images or get the contact info. If you've done your thousand little marketing jobs right they've already seen your images in more than one place.

I'm looking into Animoto right now. Seems like a fun way to make tasty little motion bites. Do you have experience with Animoto? Would love to hear how you use it and how you market with it in the comments.

Thanks, Kirk