It's time for macro photography. Now what better way to demonstrate to you all macro photography to show you how to shoot macro photos then to shoot food. Alright now let's talk through what we're going to be doing here. So to help us out we have our good friend and professional chef James Lee. And James could basically be helping with cooking and also plating the food so the food styling and everything. Okay, so we have James here to help out with that.

Let's talk about our lighting setup. And some things you guys need to know from the photography standpoint, probably one of the most important things to know is the actual lens that we're gonna be using for macro photography. macro lens is going to allow us to focus in on our subject at a very close range, and the actual kit lenses that come with both of our Canon and Nikon cameras and also other cameras and make and mix that are out there. The kit lens that come with they're actually pretty decent at macro photography. For example, this 18 to 55 lens, it actually can focus at a range of about point eight feet, which is solid, I could be taking my shots from right here, and at 55 millimeters. It's actually more like I don't know 8090 millimeters on this camera because this is a one point six crop sensor camera.

So we're seeing a closer focal length than this actually is telling us it's actually closer than 55. This is beautiful because it allows us to get close and they get these nice tight focus shots on these kind of macro images. Now, same thing with the Nikon, we can also use other lenses, like their specialty macro lenses, but they cost quite a bit more. So again, we want to try and do everything we can with just the basics. That way if you do have say 100 millimeter f 2.8 macro well you can get even more amazing macro images. But even with our standard kit lenses and our standard camera, we're going to be able to pull off really professional macro shots.

So remember, that's one big important thing is that focusing distance by the way, if you're too close in the focusing distance, the lens is simply just not going to focus Okay, so you got to make sure you're behind that minimal focus distance and it will tell you typically right on the lens itself. Next we have to have the lenses here that are also great for macro photography, particularly on these two camera bodies because again, they're crop sensor bodies, so we get a little bit of amplification on the focal length. These are the 15 mils. meters we have the 50 meter 1.8 for both the Nikon and for the canon, we have our scrims here we have just a standard scrim, and we have our Five on one reflector. On this side, we'll be using the reflector to add a little bit of light in here and there.

And we'll be using the scrim if we need to block any light or to soften light. Okay, so what we have here is a little Well, we're going to call this our placeholder. So what we want to do is get everything ready, get our lighting, get our camera, set up everything good to go with our placeholder images or our placeholder subject. And then we're going to add in the the food as soon as he plates it, and we're going to shoot it as plated. Now what I have to do is choose how I want to shoot this. Okay, so the lights coming from the right side, and again, it creates a nice directional look to it, it's not bad, it's better than shooting it flat.

So instead, what I want to do is actually shoot against the light. The problem though is if I go and do that right now, if I shoot against the light, most likely the flash is going to pop back up and you saw that why because this side is becomes too dark. We're shooting from the shadow side. But what we do get when we shoot from the shadow side is a beautiful highlight along the outside of the food and that highlight is going to Add a lot of extra dimension into these images, we want to go for that. But what we need to do, we're going to shoot this way towards the light, but we're going to use a silver side reflector to fill that light back in. So essentially what we're going to be doing is bringing up this silver reflector and we're going to bring this right over to the light, I'm gonna be careful not to hit any of these.

And we're going to grab that light directly from the window and we're going to fill it right back into the food. And what that will do is just create a nice bright light on the front that's going to fill the shadows But still, the highlight on the back is going to be a little bit brighter, we're going to get a beautiful highlight in the backside. Okay, so already you guys can see exactly how this is going to turn out. We're going to we're going to do is come around to the other side. We're going to get everything set up get all of our shot and everything ready and in place. And then we're just gonna wait for James to basically plate the food.

So let's do that now. All right, so James is just finishing up some of the details over there with a steak. We're getting ready to play it for good and we need to make sure that we got our settings and everything all right. Now let's go ahead and bring the silver signup live is gonna be helped me to hold The Silver side reflector in close, we're going to bring this into Phil, I'm going to show you some of the challenges that we're gonna be having when keeping it in the automated macro mode. And generally automated macro mode works great, we're on the low flower mode and it works great when there's enough light in the scene. But the problem is, when there's not enough light, it's gonna pop the flash up and you're gonna see right now let me bring up the live view just so you guys can see what's happening.

Here's my focus area and even with the silver side, the reflector in when I go to fire, it pops the flash up. Okay, now with the flash, it's not going to look good. Now I could keep shooting this way I could keep shooting in macro mode with automated macro mode. And sometimes I'm going to get it to work without flash, sometimes it's going to flash, it's going to be really irritating. What I'm going to do actually is flip over to manual and just show you guys how I do it on my own. And what I'll probably do too is let's go ahead and switch out to actually the 50 millimeter 1.8 lens too, so we can actually dial down to a more shallow aperture if we want to, but let's go ahead and dial in the setting that we want to use for this.

If I end up getting a lot of the background, then I'll adjust it from there. So I'm gonna go down to you know, like right around one 200 to a second is pretty solid. Let's go ahead and bring up our histogram so we can see where we're at. And the histogram, you can see that our shadows, we still have a little bit of ways to go there, but our highlights are kind of peaking a little bit. So what I might do is go to about one two videos a second or just bring my aperture up, so maybe I'll shoot it at 2.8 because at F two, it is a little bit too shallow, at least for this macro shot, I want a little bit more depth of field. Next, I'm just going to, we'll get out of the aperture menu, there we go.

And we're going to slow down the shutter a little bit to balance it out. And this is gonna be right where we're going to be at, we're going to also bring in the silver side of the reflector to be right there to fill in that deep dark shadow and then we're going to basically shoot our shot. Okay, so we're ready to go. We're going to plate the steak right onto here. We're going to set it up and then we're going to go ahead and shoot it. So let's do that.

Now. What I found that I really I realized that basically from this side, we're not getting enough light, the lights coming straight at me, our shadow is going to be on this side, we need to reflect back in here. Okay, so we're just going to make a little modification instead of reflecting them this side where we have enough light because light kind of bouncing off the refrigerator, everything is giving us a little bit light over here, we need to bring the reflector on the left side, and then we're good to go. So let's just do that real quick. Let's bring a reflector over this time. Now when y'all are on a shoot, I want to give you a little tip that always helps out.

Make sure to keep your shooting and your thought process fluid throughout the shoot. Don't get stuck trying to make something work. When you're shooting, you're sort of solving a problem solving a puzzle. You're trying to arrive at that best light that best look that best everything just for that right image. And sometimes it really requires that you might change the lighting or the composition or whatever it is. If something isn't working, do exactly what pi is done here and make adjustments.

You should be constantly adjusting and fine tuning it. Every scene to get that perfect look. So take a shot, take a look at the image, fine tune it, adjust it, and then keep shooting. Don't just rattle off 100 shots thinking, Oh, I can just fix that in post. No, no, no, take the time to get it right in camera, and then you'll end up with a much better image for post production. I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the 18 to 55 just because I think it'll let me get a little bit closer.

But I do need to raise the ISO so we'll probably go up to 400 ISO on this camera. And that should be okay. Let's see. Okay, that looks gorgeous. Now we're just waiting for our next plate which is almost done. Is it ready?

Sweet. Okay, well, I'm going to swap you out. Don't lose that. I want to eat it. Okay, so here we have something a little bit different. This go round.

We have a reflective surface here in the White and that's going to create it. A little bit of challenge. The white plate is beautiful because we're going to make the food pop but check this out. I'm going to take a quick shot here. I want y'all to see basically what I'm saying. What I wanted to show you is just that the we're picking up reflections, anything white or anything silver or with a reflective surface is going to pick up reflections around it.

So to control that, since we're trying to control white reflections on a white surface, well, I'm going to use the white scrim. Okay, so let's bring this down for one second, we're still going to use this in just a second to fill light in. But for now, what I want to do is actually bring out our scrim and we're going to hold this directly over the plate just like this. Now with that in place, I can take the same shot and you're going to notice that it really does a great job of mitigating these reflections. I do need to make a little bit of adjustment for light here. Okay, let's just take that quick shot.

And you can see how much less reflection there is in the shot now. Okay, so that's great. And what we want to do is, we're probably bring this down really close to the food just so we get a nice kind of bright look on the food. It's going to create a really beautiful look and I'm gonna get in there and actually shoot the shot so you're probably going to see me disappear underneath this. Okay, we're going to use this Same lenses are 18 to 55. I'm going to go ahead and get in there.

We're going to get in here tight like this. And then with my elbows on the table, I'm going to shoot this, okay? So remember slow shutter speed means take a couple extra shots. I have my highlighter on right now, and it tells me that I don't have anything blown. So the image looks nice, it looks bright and beautiful. But we're okay because we haven't blown anything out.

Okay, so it looks kind of too bright. But that's why we use the histogram. That's why we use the highlight alert, because this is a very high key scene that you're looking at. The steak was very kind of low key, it was very dark. So with a high key scene with a low key, you want to make sure that we're using the histogram because otherwise, well, we can't really tell where those tones are gonna lie. Okay, from the from the screen, it looks like it's blown out but in reality, it's actually not