One secret simple ingredient to lift your food photograhy!

A couple of weeks ago I was pootling from Melbourne to Sydney on the XPT train, quietly happy that the paired seat next to me was empty because I would be able to spread myself and have a bit of a snooze.

No sch luck. At Wangaratta, a couple of hours north of Melbourne, another passenger boarded and occupied that seat. A not insubstantial chap. He hauled a MacBook Pro 13" out of his bag, and began to type furiously. So much for spreading myself!

After some hours of serious work, he completed his writing, sent it off by email using his de-vice as a modem (and setting the messages up, queued, then hitting "send" when the train went through a small town -- the train was not wired for internet and seemed to bear a strong resemblance to a Faraday cage so there was just a glimpse of a window of opportunity to email when we went through a town and connection was at its strongest) and settled back for a cup of tea and a chat.

Turns out he was a journalist -- a freelance food writer, photographer, and author.

So we talked about the tasks and travails of what he does and what I do. I asked him about his food photos. Did he take them all himself or did he have specialists do the work for him. Occasionally specialists, but nearly all his own work, he said. I admired a couple of pix he showed.

"I've never been really satisfied with my food pictures. Yours look really lively and well lit, but clearly you don't carry a portable studio in your baggage. What's your secret?" I asked.

"Backlight!" he said. "You get one light behind the food, have the front lit by some diffused source such as a south facing window (north in the northern hemisphere), then bang away."

I looked at his pix again. Yes!

Tonight I finally got around to testing it with an extremely scratch set up. The FL600R flash behind and a little higher (sitting on an upturned tupperware box!) and set to RC and TTL, the GX7 in front with the pop-up flash set to "Wireless On" in the "Flash" menu ("Rec" menu).

No south light -- the sun set something more than two hours ago -- so the output of the pop-up would have to cover the front.

Some results with scratch food using this scratch set up -- all OOC JPEGs except for resizing:

With the on-camera pop-up flash and some ambient light (halogen down lights). Pretty dull.

Pop up flash with FL600R behind the fruit and pointed down a bit. I didn't even bother to polish the apples, which were rather dull, but you can see how the backlighting has vivified the fruit and added a three dimensional look to the picture.

The kids were having a toasted sandwich (don't ask what sort of a mess they had inside them!)

My daughter and I were having a soup packed full of vitamins and minerals, and I added a couple of toasted muffins.

Pretty good, eh? The 4th pic could do with being brightened a bit, some diffused light in front would be nice, as would som more attenton to composition (sorry, I was hungry!!!) but given the limitations of the equipment, the results are pretty amazing in my view.

By the way, be careful not to raise the back light too high. I did try a couple more shots of he soup in an effort to get rid of that shadow at the back of the bowl, but the texture in both he toast and the soup simply disappeared.

The GX7 was shooting through the mighty 12-32 lens.