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18 Contents PhotoYou — Winter 2010
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Reader letters Your letters and views of PhotoYou
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Zoom in on the latest news in snapshots, shutterbugs and gadgets in the beautiful world of photography
50 How deep is your picture breaks down the simple facts of the oft-used term "depth of field" 52 Fat of the land Perfect that scenery shot
10 Back TO Black introduces the best gift anyone can buy for their loved ones – the Canon PIXMA Black Series Printer
60 Happy Family dishes out easy advice on how to picture your loved ones this Christmas
12 ART of Photography shows off the visual art that is making waves
66 bracketing exposures shows you how to get that travel picture just right
Emulate
68 Dance in Focus Master the art of shooting movement in dance
18 Nature's best and the latest book by worldrenowned photographer, Anne Geddes 26 Life Through a lens gets up close with New Yorkbased Melisa Teo 34 Shoot to Thrill discovers Canon's Face of EOS, Melissa Boey and her fascination with photography
Empower 42 Fashion Forward Learn how to shoot good fashion pictures with photographer Zhang Jingna 2 PhotoYou
58 Twilight teaches you how to capture the moon
78 Eat. Shoot. Yummy! Food blogs are all the rage; here's how to fill your blog with delectable photos 84 Let's go inside Learn the tricks of shooting consistently good photos indoors
Engage 88 Surviving the wet Protect your camera from the wet and cold season 90 Arm candy Check out the prettiest camera bags in store and start hinting heavily!
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PhotoYou President, Asia Pacific/latin america Patricia Hespanha Editor-IN-CHIEF Dora Cheok Design Director David Ross
Meet the Team! Managing Editor Valerie Wee valerie@photoyoumag.com
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art director Melanie Tu melanie@photoyoumag.com designer Sharlene Leong Proofreaders Evelyn Tan-Rogers Shawn Pang
Our Sales People PUBLISHER & MANAGING DIRECTOR Christopher Axberg Group Advertising Director, Asia Philip Yeo
96 what's that?! Uncover the functions of your DSLR 98 The art of giving illustrates how Canon's SELPHY can make great Christmas gifts 104 Snap to unclutter shows you how pictures can organise your life
Experience 106 Mystery paradise takes a climb up to Shangri-La with Janice Wong for a look at paradise
Circulation Marketing Director Sharon Low CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, Asia Pacific Jeremy Jacobs Operations Director, Asia Pacific Andrew Grace Production Controller Lim Ling Ling Senior Account Manager Stephanie Tok stephanie@photoyoumag.com
114 kitty castaways hangs out at the island of Enoshima 118 the light from within features Melisa Teo's travel to a spiritual place
Published quarterly by Reader’s Digest Asia Pte. Ltd. for Canon Singapore Pte Ltd, Company Number:200607506M © 2009/10 Reader’s Digest Asia Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner in whole or part in English or other languages prohibited. Protection secured under the International and Pan-
Regulars 124 shoot & tell We eyeball our readers’ pictures and give our two cents worth 127 Submit your pictures to our Contest and win great Canon prizes
American copyright conventions. Reader’s Digest, The Digest and the Pegasus logo are registered trademarks of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. All PhotoYou logos are trademarks of Reader's Digest Association, Inc. used under licence. All rights reserved. Printed by Times Printers Pte Ltd, 16 Tuas Ave. 5, Singapore 639340. Singapore MICA (P) 204/01/2010. Malaysia KDN PPS-1764/04/2011(028565). Registered Representative: Patricia Hespanha. Address: 10 Eunos Road 8, #12-03, Singapore Post Centre, Singapore 408600. Winter 2010 3
Kopi and Kaya Toast A well-taken food photo can evoke good memories.
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Eat.Shoot. Yummy! Food blogger Leslie Tay lets PhotoYou in on some of the secrets to shooting the delicious in food words and photos Leslie Tay of ieatishootipost.sg
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ith the rise of mobile phone cameras and social networking sites, food photography has taken off in a big way. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see people taking photos of what they are about to eat. The number of photos tagged “Food” on the photo-sharing website Flickr has increased tenfold to six million in just two years. People take photos of almost everything they eat. From hawker foods to high-end gourmet dining, home cooked meals to school lunches – anything that’s edible is fair game. As a result, a new genre of photography has been born – that of shooting food on the go. Traditionally, food photography was reserved for the professionals who were shooting for advertising agencies and magazines. Now it seems that just about anyone with a camera can potentially be a food photographer. But ultimately, the picture will make or break the medium, be it a blog or an advertisement. It’s vital to get food pictures right, and most importantly, make them drool worthy. Unlike other forms of photography, food photos engage all the five senses because it involves our sense of taste. A good food photo should be able to evoke food memories that elicit a physical response like a “mmm”, moist lips and a growling tummy. Many of the participants at our food photography
workshops agree that this is one of the main reasons why they share photos of the food they eat! In this article I will highlight some tips on how to take better-looking food photos at a hawker centre or restaurant, where all you have is your DSLR and the delectable dish in front of you. Your photos can still look delicious if you follow a few simple rules, and the good news is that you don’t even need an expensive camera to achieve it!
Lighting Most professional food photos are shot in a studio with controlled lighting. For the person who wants to simply take a photo of the dish before it disappears forever down the stomach, there are practical limitations to contend with. Posh restaurants usually have dim lighting and hawker centres often use fluorescent light, so how do we get around this problem? Try to shoot most of your photos during the day so that you can take advantage of natural daylight. At hawker centres and coffee shops, tables around the periphery provide the best light as the dish is illuminated with ambient light and there is a brighter source of directional light coming from either a window or the open side of the food centre. As a general rule, food looks best when there is a bit of sheen and translucency. This can be achieved by positioning your dish with directional light coming from a 10 or 2 o’clock position. Winter 2010 79
Front Lighting vs Back Lighting Proper lighting can really bring out the positives in your dish.
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Back lighting
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The back lighting will help create translucency, which adds an extra dimension to ingredients like prawn shells, thinly sliced slivers of fat, or crumbs of a sugee cake like the photos above. We all love food that is juicy and moist, and with back lighting you will be able to capture the glistening sheen of that layer of oil on top of your slice of bacon. It will also help to create shadows and accentuate meat fibres, making your photo irresistibly drool worthy. A white card placed in front of the dish can sometimes be used to reflect available light around and provide fill lighting to lessen harsh shadows at the front of the dish.
light to take a photo. If there is enough ambient light, try to increase the ISO and open the aperture as wide as possible, while using your camera bag to steady the camera and reduce camera shake. When you do need to use the flash, the simplest way to achieve an acceptable result without too much fuss is to bounce the flash off the ceiling. Whatever the case may be, try to avoid using direct flash as far as you can. For food lovers like myself, I would rather not take a photo if it was going to turn out bad, so sometimes, you just have to comfort yourself with the thought that the memory of a good meal is good enough.
Go ‘Au Naturale’
Compose for Maximum Effect
One of the most important tips you should know concerns the use of the flash in food photography. Food shot from a compact camera with the direct pop-up flash is one of the surest ways of making food look unappetising. The fact is that we seldom see food or anything else for that matter with a light source coming out from our forehead, so a plate of your favourite fried noodles will look flat and soulless. The flash is a necessary evil which will come in handy when there is simply not enough
When it comes to composition, the same rules apply to food as they do with other subjects. The most natural thing to do for most beginners is to put the dish right in the centre of the photo and ensure they have a nice margin around the sides of the bowl so that everything is captured in the photo. This seldom produces compelling photos. There are two important aspects that we want to focus on in composition. The first is how to compose your shots and the second is cropping.
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Rule of Thirds For maximum effect, place the hero of your dish right at the intersection of two lines.
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The Rule of Thirds and Fibonacci Spirals
tip join the workshop These are just some of the tips that are shared during the food photography workshops which are organised in conjunction with Canon Singapore. For more details, go to http://ieatishootipost. sg/2010/08/canon-ieat-foodphotography-workshop.html
When I look at a bowl of prawn noodle soup, the first thing I ask myself is which part of the dish is the most compelling and try to focus on that. With prawns, as with people, the eyes are often the bits that will capture the most attention. This is the part that needs to be placed close to the “power point” when employing the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is a basic concept in photography that involves placement of objects along lines that divide the frame into thirds. If you divide your photo into thirds both horizontally and vertically, you will end up with nine equal squares. The four corners of the middle square are the “power points” and placement of your subject close to the power points will make for balanced composition. If you are a student of photography, you will no doubt have been exposed to the idea of the rule of thirds. But have you ever asked yourself why it works? Well, the rule of thirds is an approximation that there exists a divine proportion that is found in nature. This divine proportion is based on the Winter 2010 81
Fibonacci Spiral Like the rule of thirds, placing your focus within this spiral instantly makes your shot look better.
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Fibonacci sequence, which consists of a progression of numbers that is derived from the sum of the two preceding numbers i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 . . . to infinity. If you now take the consecutive number pair 13 and 8 and use them to draw a rectangle, you will produce a perfect rectangle. It is perfect because you can place subsequent rectangles formed with the preceding number pairs, i.e. 8 and 5, within this rectangle and it will fit perfectly. You can continue to do this with subsequent number pairs. In the end you will have a series of rectangles within a rectangle. If you now connect the opposing corners of the squares that have been formed with a smooth spiral, you will derive a Fibonacci spiral. This spiral is found everywhere in nature, from nautilus shells to the spiral of the Milky Way! Now that you know about the Fibonacci spiral, let’s apply it to our food photos. As you can see, the lines in the Fibonacci sequence basically divide each rectangle roughly into a third, or a ratio of 1.618 to be exact. We now arrange our dishes so that it fits into a Fibonacci curve and hey presto, suddenly you have created a photo that looks well balanced. It is not a random occurrence. It is your eyes telling you that you are looking at something which we have all been nurtured to perceive as natural and beautiful. Of course, both the rule of thirds and Fibonacci curves serve only as guides. Once you have taken enough photos, you will find that you are composing your photos without much thought about these rules. But when you examine your best photos, you might just find that you have unconsciously employed these rules to achieve your best-looking shots! 82 PhotoYou
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Fibonacci spiral This theory suggests that a divine proportion exists in nature.
Cropping Keeps Things Interesting One of the easiest ways for beginners to improve their photos is simply to zoom in and crop out any part of the photo that is uninteresting. Zooming in and cropping often means cutting off part of a bowl or a plate, which might be counter-intuitive at first, but when you get used to it, you will be able to create more compelling shots. When you always try to include the whole plate, your photos will often have lots of empty, boring spaces. Instead of looking at the plate, try to frame your shots just by focusing on the food itself and look at the plate with your peripheral vision. Then take a photo, placing the most interesting ingredient along the one third line. In that way you will be able to zoom in close enough to see the texture of the different ingredients.
Choosing Your Focus Points Choosing the right point of focus is very important in food photography as you can have a lot of components in a small space all vying for attention. In the photos on the right, the further picture is more compelling than the one on the left because the vermicelli is more interesting to look at than the green vegetable. Subtle differences like this can change the impact of the photo so make sure you choose your focus points carefully.
Depth of Field Food photos benefit from a shallow depth of field where there is one small area in focus and the rest of the photo is blurred.
empower
There is a scientific reason for this. The distance at which we see our food is usually within half an arm’s length. If you try to look at anything at this distance you will notice that only the centre of your vision is clear while the rest of the objects in the other parts of your visual field are blurred. Hence when taking food photos, the dish looks more natural and hence more appetising if it mimics what the eye actually sees. The problem is that the blur (known technically as “bokeh”) is not easily produced unless you use a good DSLR like the Canon EOS 550D. To obtain a smooth bokeh, you need to achieve a shallow depth of field and that means big apertures, which means expensive lenses. A lens which can offer an aperture of f/2.8 is usually very good for food photos. I currently use the Canon EF 24mm-70mm f/2.8L USM lens for most of my food photos, and most of the photos featured in this article are shot with that setup. If you are using an APS-C camera, the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM lens is excellent as is the EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. I have used both these lenses on a Canon EOS 450D and they produce excellent results.
Focus Point Learn to pick only the most delicious part of your dish to focus on.
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Adding Human Interest Taking shots of food does not have to be limited to just the dish alone. You can make the photo come alive by adding some human interest in the background. This is an easy way of filling up empty space in the background, which would otherwise be occupied by a plain table surface or something rather innate. A hand holding a pair of chopsticks can really help to liven up the photo without taking too much attention away from the subject. Of course nicely manicured hands make for prettier photos!
Food & Work Leslie Tay in his food photography workshops.
Ramen Don’t be afraid to add a human element to make your shot stand out.
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