Lighting Food

This time it's simple food or product lighting. I learned this style of lighting when I was a stills assistant and we produced hundreds of pack shots for catalogues.

There are 2 variations, first with a Softbox and then with any lamp and a poly reflector... This is the software that I use to generate these images.

A very basic soft top backlight, vary the position until the product looks good.

Add a black flag at the back edge of the table and raise until you get the effect you want.

Add side flags to get more definition into the image.

Add front flag to increase depth of shadows, sometime this is replaced with a reflector, it depends on the product.

The position of the lamp, flags and reflectors will change according to the product and also where they may want captions and logos

You tweak and adjust, sometimes using fingers and dots and mini nets.

This is the same starting approach as the top image, just using a poly bounce and any lamp you happen to have around, in this case a small ARRI Fresnel.

Then add flags as before, if you don't have flags then bits of black card work just as well.