Challenges in food documentation

I love this project, and always glad to do it. However it doesn’t mean that i never get enough challenge, brainstorming and ‘crisis-management’ during documenting my food in different situations.. HAH-AH, i definitely face enough problems to solve during my “food-photoraphful” everydays.

Here are the TOP 7 most often challenges i face:

1.) Providing White Background

..In any circumstances.
Sometimes i find myself lack of white colored surface that i can use as proper background for the transparent glasses, containers, plates of my meals or beverages.

If there is no way to use white background, the final food photo is visually inappropriate and will take a lot of extra time and effort to make it visually acceptable in Adobe Photoshop then.

Here are some examples:

20150305_140012_resize — Black plate is the worst possible choice in most of the times. Sometimes it’s too late to avoid.

20150307_224005_resize — Annoying reflections from the surface. It takes extra movements to separate the food from the surroundings (background) then.

20150328_155300_resize — However the food is well lit, the background is random, so it will take a massive amount of time to cut the food out by hand. (You can see a video of the manual cutting process in the “Thank You For My Daily Food Project” or “The Procedure” pages.

20150329_145914_resize — Transparent plate / container, bad lighting conditions an lack of white, even surface. One of the worst possible conditions (nightmare category :P).

20150404_183458_resize — ‘Original’ but absolutely inadequate surface for the food. Ok.. yes, there is a natural demand that the artist sometimes need to incorporate itself into the art-piece… 😉

20150405_165622_resize — I am not extremely glad when it happens, but it’s quite factual by the way.. Food presented on the second round. The plate is already “painted” by the first round. Technically i take double photo of some minor amount of my food. Should avoid it.

20150411_162208_resize — In such unordinary cases i fail to capture the whole food. Cut some parts off the photo. Then it’s hard to represent it on a visually adequate and comprehensive way.

20150411_205804_resize — Reflecting surface. A real terminator 🙂 We can call it as an “apocalypse” of my food processing session. I hate to cut out food from shiny, glossy, background.

20150423_135740_resize — Rare (but funny) cases. I get a piece of food as a tasting sample in the store, or from a friend to have a bite. There is time when i am lazy or lack of white background, so use my palm. Then “enjoy” my manual-cutting Photoshop session later….

20150503_004357_resize — Sometime the photo is useful as a diary that shows what i dealt with on that specific day and time, but perfectly useless as a background for my food photo project.

20150602_181754_resize — Ice creams are usually “end up” like this..

2.) Low Battery or no phone/camera around

20150305_190000_resize — If my phone battery is to low or totally dead, there comes the time for me to wait until get charged to the level or to ask one (or more) of my friends to take a proper photo -with flash on- about my food unit then send me the photo..

3.) Unlucky lighting conditions

20150329_150228_resize — Too strong direct sunlight causes strong shadows and the flashlight og the phone/camera has no effect anymore. (The flashlight supposed to provide the uniformed visual appearance since by using flash the angle and intensity of light is the same every time.

4.) No more snacking from the snack bag

I need to pour a bigger amount of snack, nut, candy, sunflower seed, whatever i want to eat. Technically i havn’t eat any food from it’s container in the last 10 years without taking a photo of them on a white background surface first ;).