Photography Projects

One of my "newest" hobbies is photography, though I have actually had an interest for many years. I've always been a bit of an experimenter and found that photographing animals, landscapes and food in natural and artificial light has real appeal for me. Perhaps one day I'll also want to learn more about people portrait photography but right now non-people portraits hold my attention most.

For example, a simple trip to Reid Park Zoo in Tucson recently yielded these interesting animal portraits:

The secret to getting these shots really is patience (except for the camel, who seemed eager to pose!). You end up shooting dozens of shots before find the right one. Hooray for digital cameras!

I've also been working with diffused lighting, as food photographers use to highlight food subjects in mouthwatering ways. For shots like this I built a simple light box by taking an 18x18 box and cutting out 16 inch windows on three sides and covering two opposing windows with white muslin cloth. Camera lighting is fairly cheap; you can buy a couple of 600 lumen LED table lights for about $20.

Fill the back interior of the box with the non-glossy side of a poster board and you have a white infinity. For this shot of a rather ordinary slice of Pizza Hut pizza, a couple of boneless chicken wings and two cheese sticks I bought a wooden wall plaque from Michael's to suggest a table, set a small plate of the food on it and placed a fork nearby, shooting from the top window of my light box. The effect is that of a gourmet meal and a pretty cool shot!

I'll post some Youtube videos of people building light boxes in the near future. It's not hard at all to do, inexpensive and the results are pretty awesome. The really good news is that you don't even need fancy cameras to do a project like this, which is very effective if you are a seller of small products on Ebay for example. A cell phone camera can be equally effective!