Help in lighting this photo

[solkornfeld]

I'm looking for help in getting comments on this shot, i need help in lighting and perhaps a different lens.
Nikon D7000
AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4g
D1 Air 500 W/S 2 Monolights

 

[MLeeK]

The lighting looks fine. The composition and crop not so much. The mess in the background not so much.

 

[amolitor]

Glass is TOUGH. Your lights tend to show up in the reflections and look silly. Use of variously shaped pieces of white mat board to create attractive looking reflections, while revealing the shape of the glass, while still bouncing appealing light onto the subjects, is the general theme of this sort of thing. Also, covering a lot of stuff up with black fabric, including yourself and most of the camera, tripod, etc. Start looking at the reflections closely and thinking about it hard -- it'll drive you insane, but you'll get a much better photograph out of it. It's just wretched when you make a beautiful picture, it's lovely.. except that I can see the photographer, the tripod, the softbox, and the photographer's terrible hawaiian shirt all reflected in that one glass.

I can't help you with lighting until I have some notion of what you're going for. Is this supposed to look like an intimate dinner, lit by the candles we see in the frame? Is it a business power-lunch?

 

[TCampbell]

Doing this for fun or do you plan to do something with the image (which, presumably would have food on the plate?) I set up food shots by getting the table styled first, and using a "stand in" prop to represent the food position so I can work on composition and lighting.

But one of the questions is: what are you trying to represent? If the shot is about the food, then it needs to be about the FOOD and not the table dressing. I have a shot that I've posted in the past that I did for a restaurant where the shot was, in part, about the food... but since they want you to eat this food "at the restaurant" they wanted the table to look inviting. In that case, the food was tack-sharp but the table dressing was allowed to go soft (I used a moderately narrow DoF at f/4, but a 2nd dish *had* to be shot at f/11 and I had to do a bit of photoshopping to match the bokeh of the f/4 shot.)

In any case... usually you'd crop in more so that the viewer can see all the tasty and enticing details of the food.

Now about that lighting. You need to diffuse the light. I shouldn't be seeing clearly defined shadows (the glass of orange drink is casting a shadow on the white plate. The silverware is casting shadows on the napkin, etc.)

The light needs to be shot through a screen, soft-box, shoot-through umbrella, or something to diffuse the point of origin and soften the edges.

ALSO... keep in mind that as you move the light source farther away, the relative size of the point of origin is shrinking. In other words... if you're shooting through a shoot-through umbrella and it's about 4' in diameter and it's only 4' away, that'll be VERY diffuse. If that same light is 12' away... it wont be so diffuse anymore. You'll adjust power level on the lights to control the power (don't adjust the f-stop or you'll mess up your desired DoF, and adjusting the shutter speed doesn't really work for strobes because the amount of time that the strobe is at high power is very small a rolling focal-plane shutter gets wonky lighting (caused by the shadow of the partially opened shutter) if you try to exceed that speed.

 

[tirediron]

Very good advice from Tim; this would be a VERY difficult (needlessly so?) shot to light well. If you could simply it somewhat, it would make things much easier. A more conventional layout, as well as removing the glass box wit the three candles, and the blue wine bottle, would make lighting easier, and reduce the detail in the image making it more visually appealing IMO as well.