stock photography

My food weekend

After noticing the lack of roast beef sandwiches on Dreamstime and confirming with iStock the same, I decided to do a sandwich shoot.  I thought it would be my first “easy food” shoot.  I mean..how hard can it be to style a sandwich? 8 toothpicks and 2 frustrating hours later I can honestly say it’s WAY harder than it would appear.

The second part of my foodie weekend was a birthday party / dinner party.  We combined an adult-based dinner party for the family with our 14 year old’s birthday party to come up with a menu of: pizza bites (slice in between each and every pepperoni) and tomato skewer appetizers, one huge tossed salad and saute of chicken and broccoli over penne as the main course.  We followed that with birthday cake of course!  Since we technically had my birthday to celebrate as well and 15 guests, we made two cakes.

Here are some quick images I shot this weekend – not the best of the best but at least a few I have already edited.  I’ll post the recipe for the chicken and broccoli on my MattAntonino.com site later today.

stock photography

Be a ________.

During the last few months one of my major goals has been to shoot more food photography.  I am really interested in the subject, I enjoy all aspects of it, and I think I can do it well (eventually).

So my past few months have been focused on learning – studying food photos, “becoming” a foodie, learning styling techniques – I never wanted to jump straight into food but rather be a food person who knew how to photograph.  I’ve been studying food, food photos, collecting recipes, deciding on what I want to focus on. In learning to “be” a food stylist/chef  you learn about presentation.

Thus my thought for the moment – become involved in the shots you want to shoot.  You shoot sports?  Go PLAY sports more – referee for the kid leagues, shoot hoops more at the park and watch more games.  See how the pros present sports.  You want to shoot business people?  Get deeper into business – meet with SCORE, talk about business planning and attend a seminar so you can see how someone has designed their speech.  Desire to shoot more animals & nature?  Interact – get out there, follow wildlife, hunt (with or without the gun), track animals – learn their behaviors.

— Related tangent —

When I first started learning to be a wedding photographer I listened to everything wedding photographers said. Advertising, marketing, sales, websites, SEO, photography & lighting, everything!  Eventually it dawned on me that photographers were good at making images.  I should learn advertising from an advertising specialist.  I no longer pay much attention to wedding photographers when they speak on subjects other than booking or shooting weddings.  The thought is very similar to what I’m talking about above.  Learn to be great at your subject – not just aware of it.

Sometimes when I want to shoot something I just pull it up, shoot it, wonder why it doesn’t sell.  I think the main reason is because someone else understands the subject while I just wanted a good photo of it.  Can I take good photos?  Yes.  Absolutely!  I shot models for years – and then I realized that because I don’t enjoy it all that much, the images weren’t high-class.  I can shoot well enough but the connection wasn’t there.  The question is – how involved are you in the shoot?

It doesn’t make sense for a city-dweller to go shoot cows and barns.  It doesn’t make sense for a sporty jock to shoot ballet.  Who are YOU and what can you shoot better than everyone else?

stock photography

Preparing Our Next Shoot

I wanted to document a bit of how we prepare for a new stock shoot.  Unfortunately I’m not shooting hot models a la Chase Jarvis so I’m not going to be live demo’ing anytime soon!

Our thought process on a new photo shoot works something like this:

1. Overall concept/theme/ingredient
2. Specific recipe
3. Lighting/angles/technicals
4. Shop
5. Shoot Day

1. Overall concept/theme/ingredient

We shoot two days a week – Friday and Sunday. If we shoot more that’s fantastic.  If not, oh well.  We plan those two days to have one breakfast or lunch type shoot (Friday) and one dinner/dessert (Sunday).  It’s easier to spend a long time cooking/shooting on Sundays for us and dinner/dessert usually seems to take longer than breakfast/lunch.

I follow some really great foodies on Twitter/Facebook/blogs.  One thing I always look for is a recipe that a) will taste great and b) will LOOK great.  As a bonus I often look to see if I can find a healthy version so nobody gains 10 pounds per recipe I shoot.

2. Specific Recipe

So Friday we need to create a lunch. I bookmarked a delicious looking recipe two weeks ago and decided quickly I’d try that this week.  The recipe will be 3 Cheese Chicken Cacciatore Manicotti.  That was easy.  We also need to figure out dinner for Sunday.  I wanted to find something not as “fancy” as cacciatore manicotti so we looked at several recipe sites, some cookbooks and finally decided on something the Biggest Loser Cookbook called “Mom’s New Beef Stew.”  That fits my requirements: tastes great, looks super yummy and bonus: it’s fairly healthy at 275 cals per serving.

Some weeks I will decide on a recipe by ingredient.  Take Kahlua for instance.  We have leftover Kahlua from the chocolate mousse we made a week ago.  This Chocolate Truffle Pie also uses Kahlua.  If we don’t make that Sunday for dessert I’m certain we’ll make it next week.  Using ingredients you have on hand greatly reduces wastes and product going bad/old.

3. Lighting/angles/technicals

After printing the recipe and making a shopping list we write on the back of the recipe some ideas for the shoot.  Mostly this is just note-form.  Here are some examples from our banana split shoot:

• Yellow/orange
• high key
• OJ – don’t think milk will work
• Balance the color
• Angles: will be propped up?
• Spoonful

Generally meaningless until you get in the shoot.  We did end up using a yellow napkin and orange juice – it balanced the color very well.  We did some shots near the end of the shoot with a spoonful of split in front of the dish.  We tried but didn’t use milk because it did, in fact, look bad.  We ended up propping the bowl with a small bottle cap for a few shots.

4. Shop

Shopping day is Thursday.  That dictates our Friday shoot – if we need something super-fresh we may have to pick that up Friday morning before the shoot.  Sunday’s shopping is done except fresh on Thursday as well.  WE have a local Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings year-round so we do our fresh shopping for Sunday then.

With our recipe and our ideas already in place shopping day is generally pretty straightforward.  Pick the best items you can find.

5. Shoot Day

Well, shoots are shoots.  The only thing we try and do specifically at each shoot is pre-organize our ideas so we don’t cut up the food before we’re done with it.  The further into a shoot we get the more we “mess” the dish and the more we feel free to cut, chop, move, adjust, add to, take from, etc.  We want to get those setup shots first, the meat of the shoot, then start playing with the outer edge of the shoot – closeups, eating, some unusual stuff just to see how it works, etc.  Get the bulk of work done when the food is as fresh and perfect as possible.  Once you get that THEN experiment.

Wrap Up

So that’s the way a typical shoot has been going for us.  We are pro photographers but very amateur food photographers. The combination is sometimes an interesting one.  I can figure out how to light something I’ve never shot before but I may not know how to drizzle syrup “correctly” yet.  We continue to read foodie sites, blogs, watch food stylist tutorials on Youtube and read food photo books.  Many many ways to learn in 2010!

Hope you enjoyed the post!  It’s great to be back and thank you for all the comments and well-wishes recently.

stock photography

Stock photography

We have a gallery of over 3000 images with multiple stock sites.  We’ll be posting images, links, information about stock photography, etc. in this section.

In order to get the maximum possible return for each image, we’ve decided to skip exclusivity for now and focus our attention on a broad spectrum of stock agencies. We are always examining, adding, removing and investigating agencies. Our plans for 2009 include adding Alamy and removing a few non-earners from our regular upload cycle. Production is key so I’ll put the list of agencies we work with into our income order.

1) Shutterstock – by far our biggest producer.

2) Dreamstime – images “season in” and produce more later than they do earlier.

3) IStock – difficult but worth it.

4) Fotolia – hard on some types of images.

5) 123RF – a mid level producer for us.

6) Bigstock – just behind 123RF in rank.

Other agencies we submit to but not regularly include:

• Canstock
• MostPhotos
• FeaturePics
• Veer Marketplace
• CutCaster
• YayMicro