HDR Food Photography 

I'm typically a no-frills kind of person when it comes to photography. I shoot with the smallest DSLR I can get away with, frame shots in camera, and use Photoshop mainly for minor tweaking of exposure and color balance. In a bit of a departure, I decided to break out the tripod and digital processing tools to play around with HDR food photography (high dynamic range) this week.

A lot of the HDR photography right now is landscape or architecture-based - well, most of my favorite shots are. I was a bit curious about how the process would affect food shots.
First off lets talk about my camera setup. I have a few cameras:
- Fuji GA645
- old-school Yashica-mat (from Kurt)
- pocket digital p+s
- various film SLRs
- Lomo
- etc.
Most of the time I shoot (and travel) with the Canon 20d. Without the grip it is small enough to carry around without being too intrusive or much of a burden. On shoots where I need more fire-power (or want the full-sensor), I take the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II- a 16.7 mega-pixel monster clearly designed for big, brawny guys. Put a large lens on this camera and you are in for sore arms the next day. I use fixed lenses - standard 50mm, 24mm, and occasionally a 100mm macro. I back up to my laptop and burn DVDs with a portable disk burner.

Detail, Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, 1656 (see full image)

A bit about HDR photography (as I understand it):
Painters often represent a dynamic range in their work that would be impossible to capture using a consumer DSLR or film camera. In the Velazquez's Las Meninas for example notice the details in the highlights in the ivory skirt of the infanta Margarita, as well as the subtle tones in the dark shadows on the back wall. Film photographers dodge and burn to bring forth and emulate this range - something you can't capture in camera.
Your eye sees in high-dynamic range. Consumer cameras can only capture a slice of that range in any one exposure - somewhere between just six and nine stops. Think about the standard "sunset" vacation shot - if you meter on the sky, everything else goes to black. If you meter on the water, the sunset gets blown out. If your camera could handle more range (HDR) you would be able to correctly expose and bridge both the sea and sky. Make sense? Another example you will often see is the inside of churches - expose for the alter and your stained glass windows get blown out, expose for the windows and your altar goes to black. The way people are currently doing HDR, by merging multiple exposures, you now have a slightly clunky (yet effective) way of expanding the range of an individual image.
The other thing that happens when you start playing around with HDR - the aesthetic of your image changes. Because much of the food-related photography I do takes place in naturally, soft-lit environments (LDR) - expanding the dynamic range of each shot isn't such an issue. I often leverage the limited range of my camera to strategically blow out certain areas in an image. I'm interested in exploring what happens aesthetically with HDR in part because as high-end DSLRs are more and more affordable, more and more people are buying them, they are using the same set of lenses, and a natural by-product of this is that you get a same-ness to much of the (straight-out-of-the-camera) food-related imagery you see. So, I'm interested in exploring ways to get away from that sameness.

HDR image (see original non-HDR version, also a larger-version HDR). The non-HDR version of the cut-melon shot is here, larger version of the HDR here

How do you make an HDR Image?
For now true HDR input and output is pricey and rare....instead, HDR images are created by combining multiple shots of the same scene taken with different exposure settings. Current monitors can't even display the true HDR - so, for me it is more of an aesthetic experiment. HDR images just look different, often not in a good way - but I think there is promise here. Don't dismiss it - many are convinced this is the future of digital imaging.
Image capturing tips:
- use a tripod
- use the lowest ISO setting possible
- auto-bracket - do a series bracketing at 1-stop, and another at 2 stops
- more detailed tips
Photoshop CS2 gives you the ability to compile HDR images, I used Photomatix this time around.
For all you shutter bugs out there who want to give it a go, I set up a Flickr group for HDR food photography - feel free to upload and share:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdrfood/