New lens! – Children’s portrait photographer, Virginia Beach, VA

I am in love. Ask not with whom but with what… my new lens, a Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM. I thought I would never want anything more than my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens but I must now recant that statement. This will be it for me, so my husband hopes.

A blustery day on the beach but had to try it out. I’ll be toting this one along with me to Monday’s portrait session. I can’t wait!

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How To Make Your Food Blog Look Tasty – tips and tricks to improve your photography

This is a repost of my guest blog entry for Estela Schnelle, author of the successful daily blog WeeklyBite.    All photos copyright © Weeklybite.com, all rights reserved. Many thanks to Estela for having me on her site as a guest blogger. I apologize for spamming her after it was posted!


If you want to grow your food blog fan club, it is essential for your images to look as tasty as the recipes themselves sound. Estela has combined mouth-watering recipes, excellent cooking instructions, and appealing images to create a blog that people want to visit again and again, and that is the ultimate goal. Return visitors = solid fan base.

So what basic techniques should you employ in your food photography. Easy, just use KISS. Here are 5 basic rules to Keep It Simple Savory.

Rule #1 Keep it simple.

The images are about the food itself and not about the items on the kitchen counter, your kitchen cabinets, or the hands holding the cooking utensils. Unless you’re a hand model, keep your hands or fingers out of the picture. To do this, get in close and crop tightly. By filling the frame with the ingredient(s) or final dish you’ll eliminate all the distractions.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Rule #2 Keep your lens wide open.

Even modestly priced digital point and shoot cameras allow the photographer some creative control. I’m talking about one setting in particular, the aperture priority setting, seen as “Av” or “A” on your camera’s main control dial. Set it to “Av”, open the lens as wide as possible – f/2.8 or f/4.0 or if your camera allows it, as wide as f/1.4 . The lower the number, the wider the aperture (the baffles inside the lens) opens up. This will give you images with a narrow focal point accompanied by pleasing bokeh for the rest of the image. Bokeh is a fancy Japanese word for the blurry or out-of-focus part of the picture. Set your camera to it’s widest setting f/1.4 or f/2.8 and experiment until you get a pleasing image that suits your taste or suits the food you are trying to photograph. The camera will automatically dial in the remaining settings for you. If you don’t have “Av” or “A” setting, try using the portrait setting which is usually indicated by an icon of a person’s side profile view.

You can’t help but look at the froth on this milkshake. The background material complements the color of the milkshake but doesn’t distract from the focal point since it is pleasingly out-of-focus. The straws lead your eyes down to the drink. Don’t you just want to drink it up right out of the picture?

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Rule #3 Keep the food in natural light.

Unless it’s absolutely necessary, complete power outage with no moon visible, or you’re a professional food stylist and photographer, turn off that pop-up flash! Estela is a master at this. Not once, while I was watching her photograph the food and ingredients, did she use the pop-up flash.

Estela has a window that casts a soothing fill light from behind and slightly to the side of her food prep area which helps accentuate the texture of the ingredient she is using. Overhead light, although slightly warmer than the daylight streaming in, just adds color to her images.

The light sweeping from the back left adds shape and texture to these eggs.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Natural lighting allows you to see and almost feel the texture of each of these ingredients.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Rule #4 Keep it off center and use shapes to enhance visual interest.

Split the camera viewfinder into thirds horizontally and vertically and place the focal point of the image in one of the four corners where the lines intersect.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

The diagonal placement of the bars below adds visual interest.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Rule #5 Keep it colorful- nothing says yummy more than color.

Who doesn’t look at a bright red strawberry, a fresh green apple, or a colorful leafy salad and immediately think healthy and tasty?

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

Add color if there is none. Estela has a collection of small fabric remnants that she uses under the bowls, plates, and ingredients to add color to an otherwise dull-colored dish or set of ingredients.

This applesauce is naturally monochromatic. Here she adds visual interest with a flowery fabric swatch beneath which adds a classic appeal to an otherwise bland-colored photo.

food photography, tips and tricks, weeklybite.com, estela schnelle

That’s it! Five simple ingredients to enhance your food imagery. You don’t need a fancy-shmancy camera to put these rules into effect. Follow even one or two of these and you’ll see marked improvement in your food photography and you can apply them to anything else you may want to photograph.

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Catedral de Sal – Travel Photography

With Easter and spring break right around the corner, 3 days to be exact, most everyone I know has travel plans of which I am envious. We’re postponing a trip to the far south for a few months so I must satiate my need to travel by perusing through old photos. I also realized that I’ve yet to post any images I took on a 5 day trip visiting my husband in Bogota, Colombia in June 2008.

While I fit in easily with my dark hair and complexion, all 6 feet of him, his fair skin and hair screamed, “American military man!” Thankfully, Bogota is not as dangerous as it has been in years past and we were adequately chaperoned. The people were quite friendly and Bogota was more cosmopolitan than I had preconceived.

I was able to kidnap our driver, Jairo, for a morning trip to the picturesque town of Zipaquira, a town 40 miles almost directly north of Bogota.

zipaquira, colombia, travel photography, grace protzman photography

It’s claim to fame is Colombia’s “Primera Maravilla” – First Wonder, the Catedral de Sal or Salt Cathedral. Quite literally, it is a cathedral carved into and out of the salt deposits of the mountain and is still a functioning salt mine. It sits 200 meters, approximately 656 feet, below the ground. It includes 14 small chapels to symbolize the stations of the cross,

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a high-domed chamber at the entrance of the main nave,

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and 3 naves with a maximum capacity of 8,000 which house a copy of the Creation of Adam and Pieta carved in salt, of course.

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Main Nave.

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I’ve attended a high noon mass at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Paris and I can recall listening to the mass being sung in operatic French in the dimly lit Romano-Byzantine styled basilica. My nape hairs tingled and goose bumps bespeckled my arms as if I were being transported back hundreds of years. I can only imagine what Easter mass would feel like 656 feet underground with Spanish words and music reverberating through the long tunnels and chambers of this most magnificent of cathedrals.

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Additional links:

Catedral de Sal
Zipaquira, Colombia

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