Commercial Food Photography

I'm shooting for The Georgetown View Magazine, in well, Georgetown, Texas. It is a magazine about the community with interesting stories and because it is free, financed with ad sales.  Every once in a while an advertiser or business owner wants additional photos for their portfolios or to be used in future ad designs.  I have photographed food for a few restaurants.

There is a different approach to attractive food photos that make you salivate. Without going into the technical set up, I'll provide a few photographs.

I'm getting hungry as I write this...

And thirsty !

That's the idea for these ads, to rattle our sense of hunger through the sense of sight. Make sense ?

RSX Studios - Gallery included!

RSX STUDIOS - What's with the name change? I am a photographer, and I photograph many things, events, portraits, editorial photography, street photography, landscapes, architectural, commercial, weddings, births, and one funeral.  But, what does a photographer DO with all those photographs on the hard drive ?  Well, I sometimes create art. More accurately, composites. Now, in additional to photographs I also have a growing inventory of art pieces that are framed and ready for delivery. Some of the pieces are photographs that have retouches to bring out the best light and shadows to make the images worth looking at, and more importantly, WORTH BUYING.

Here's a few samples:

There is more artwork available online at http://rximenez.smugmug.com/art

Lightenupandshoot with Mike Thompson

I was extremely fortunate to come to a tag along workshop with Michael Thompson, owner of Lightenupandshoot.com,  in Austin 9/14-16. His workshop covered some basics before heading out to shoot different folks on the streets of downtown. I was particularly impressed with concepts I thought I understood explained the "Mikey" way, and then after ALL THESE YEARS, I "connected the dots"!
It was interesting to be taught basics so differently. I have taken so many other workshops and seminars throughout the years, and it's pretty much taught the same way. And yes, I got it. But, during Mikey's brief review, some questions were asked that I should've quickly answered, but, I froze.
   I had been lucky to calculate my lighting to create my images. There are a few that I really liked, and looked similar to  Mr. Thompson's style. Yet, I felt I couldn't pull it off all the time, or at any time. It had to be in the 'golden moment' of light.  Well, my confidence to create this style of lighting improved greatly. Now, it is time to practice and improve the technique, without taking too long to calculate the lighting. Here are a few samples from that weekend.

   The idea of the workshop is to get the light correct in the camera so that no Photoshop is needed to fix the creation.  Lightroom is used here to further darken the clouds and soften the contrast a bit.

A couple of years ago I came up with a design
for a logo, RSX Digital Images. It was fashioned
from a rangefinder camera and my initials. I just
realized that much of my work was done in a studio type environment both indoor and outdoor.
The other part of my work is creating art from my photography. It only made sense to change the name from RSX Digital Images to RSX Studios.  I am using "plural" studios because the "other studio" is the gallery part that comes from the art creation.

Without further delay and bla-bla, I present the updated logo for RSX Studios.

So, is it HDR ?

A few years ago HDR or High Dynamic Range enter the vocabulary of photography enthusiasts all over the world. The images yields details traditionally hidden in shadows as well as shadows hidden in highlights and "blown-out" areas.  The digital age has allowed us to manipulate a photograph in a few minutes which historically took hours and even days to create in a darkroom full of chemicals and cardboard cut-outs. The first time I saw an HDR art piece on canvas took my breath away. I had never seen a photograph quite like it before. Then, these art pieces started to morph into what looked like a colorful LSD hallucination. I think they still sold. But, now, it's a trend. Todays cameras have built in HDR software or you can do a plug-in for Photoshop or any other editing software. Cool !  I guess.
But, it's now more like the "special effects" built into Picasa, Photoshop, and every other editor consumers have fun with. So, now a crappy picture looks AWESOME ! YippeeeE!
Well, I'm still impressed with the first HDR images I saw. It didn't look psychedelic at all, but natural.
Our eyes will naturally adjust for light and shadows, all the time. Yet these fresh new HDR photographs were images that resembled what my eyes naturally see.  I feel, there is an art to HDR interpretation of an image. I believe that when I see a subject, my intention is to create an image as I saw it. So, if I'm in an urban area, my eyes adjust for the shadows between the buildings and adjust again when I look up and above the buildings. I see detail in the clouds and sky too.
  I use Lightroom quite a bit for processing my images. I realized that it isn't always necessary to shoot 3 photos of a subject then merge them to get a HDR image. Below are two examples of single shot image with highlights and shadows adjusted within Lightroom.

The image below has a little vignette added to it.

Environmental Portraits with Daniel Patterson

I recently did a photo session with Daniel Patterson. We started in the studio. He didn't have anything else planned nor did I. So I suggested we move our session to a different location, an abandoned cotton gin in Walburg, Texas. I appreciate when I client allow  me to create and direct a project, which this turned into. There are so many different textures, colors, and patterns in this old gin, not to mention, the light inside is quite magical.  Here are a few samples ...

Let us create

Today I found a website of a creative photography artist, Miss Aniela, from Britain. Her work is phenomenal and of course, I was inspired. Although I created a couple of pieces recently, I have yet to be commissioned to do another. So, while being inspired by Miss Aniela, I did a self-portrait from a collection of photos I did during a photo walk in Georgetown. This is a composite using ONLY what I shot at Wolf Ranch, which, in short, are 3 photos.

                              Can you guess what are the components of my image ? 

1. The clouds were photographed separately.

2. The lilly pads were actually only part of a photograph of the pond. I then, separated the lilies into 3 parts and dodged and burn light values and shadows.

3. I was actually standing on this rock which was part of a larger bed of rock. Light values were adjusted around my head, shirt and pants to match the sky's light direction.

As, with any project, it can be further improved, but, it's just an exercise of basic Photoshop skills.

If I decide to put it on canvas, I'd work on the shirt a bit more, as well as the lilies...

Thanks for visiting.