Food in the Studio

I have finally started a bit of a push on my stock photography catalogue. This is something I have always wanted to do, but was just a bit daunted by the whole process of uploading and, above all, getting my pics accepted. It's not that my pics totally suck, rather I used to do just a little too much in the land of levels which led to a whole host of little baddies, like posterization.

Here is an image which was denied for that very reason. Posterization is when you get blocky pixels in a typically dark area. This is due to not having enough detail to bring out the colors or shadow transition you desire. You can see, if you look closely around the belly, that the shadowy bits are quite blocky, and the only way to fix this is to go back to the original and be more careful when trying to recover some of that detail.

Baby on the Horizon

So, I've gone back over that image and will be trying to upload again. Hopefully my eye is a bit better for these things now.

One of the areas I'll be focussing on now is food, because it never gets tired of you taking its picture and it's tasty! Thanks to The Strobist I have learned a whole ton about studio lighting and the whole process is going a lot easier than I thought. Here is a glass full of pomegranate seeds I did the other day.

When I go online and see some people's stock catalogues I crap myself thinking about how far behind them I am, but then I remind myself they all started somewhere. If I don't kick myself in the ass and get going now I'll never do it.