I thought I would share my Take Twelve photos and layout from September. Sept 12 happened to fall on my weekly grocery shopping day so I thought it would be cool to photograph what it takes to feed our family of seven in a week. Here are my photos:
Holy cow…that’s a TON of food!!! Anyway…I wanted to share a few photography tips here. My kitchen/dining area has some tricky lighting issues: it’s a combination of natural light, incandescent light, and florescent light. Plus with all the cabinets and shelves it’s got a lot of nooks and crannies with bad shadows. And some angles are back lit so…taking good shots of all these groceries was a challenge. Here’s what helped me out:
- I shot these on manual mode, setting the exposure for my subjects (which meant in some back lit shots the background is a bit overexposed).
- I set my camera’s exposure compensation to +3. That filled in the shadows in the nooks and crannies nicely.
- I set my white balance for auto because with the mix of lighting (natural, incandescent, florescent) my really smart camera was able to come up with the best solution.
- I had my ISO set to 1600 to capture as much light as possible indoors.
If I had been feeling really ambitious I could have hit each of these photos with a Photoshop action to cool down the yellow cast a bit, but I didn’t. That’s kind of how I see things through my own eyes in that part of my home.
Each indoor situation is a little different and you’ll have to play around until you find what works best for you, but hopefully some of these tips will help.
Now, here’s my layout for September:
For Take Twelve this month I’m sort of cheating. =) We are in the midst of renovating the front exterior of our home so I’ve been photographing the whole process and those will be my 12 photos for October. I’ll post those as soon as the awesome contractor we’re working with has finished his magic on our house.
