My name is Howard Shooter. I have been a food photographer for 20 years
and my studio is based in Camden, London.
Today we are shooting some very beautiful chocolates all day long.
Better get on with it!
I got a few minutes before the client gets here so I want to give you a quick 25 second tour of the studio.
This is the kitchen and this is the studio.
This is the props area.
This is my other studio.
This is the other kitchen and that completes the tour.
Did I do it in 25 seconds?
Today I have got a shoot for Prestat who have been my client for about 5 or 6 years.
They produce really beautiful fine chocolates.
So much so they actually have a warrant by the Queen and apparently she really loves their truffles.
There are three of us working on the shoot today.
There is Vinny who is my excellent assistant.
There is Lauren who is doing a brilliant job on the food styling.
Often we'll have a prop stylist as well. Today we didn't need one
but also they can be an intricate part of the shoot.
We are doing a big christmas theme shoot today. Lots of chocolates.
The first shot is the big shoot with the tree in, lots of lovely stockings on the top.
I always use Phase One gear in the studio.
Today we are using the 645DF+, the IQ250 and my favourite lens the macro MF 120.
It gives you fantastic depth of field. Really controllable. Beautifully sharp results.
I'm shooting tethered to the computer to Capture One Pro and I'm using the latest version: Version 8.
Capture One Pro is really easy to set up as all I need to do is
to connect the USB3 cable to the camera and computer,
start up the software and the camera is automatically detected and I'm ready to shoot.
I always start by creating a session and select my file format, ISO,
and white balance setting by the camera tool.
I have been shooting in composition mode to save on the hard disk space
and what we are going to do now is to go into Live View where we can do the fine tuning.
To get Live View started, press the film camera icon in the camera tool.
That's better. I think it is a bit red and blue at the moment,
could we have another red one next to that one on the left?
That looks better.
We just finished using Live View for our basic composition
and now we are going on to do the final tweaking,
so I'll give the iPad to Nick so he can follow the progress shot by shot.
Capture One Pro 8 connects the iPad by the Capture Pilot app.
Clients find this really useful because they can tag and star rate their favourite images
and I can then filter down their selection later.
We just finished the first shot. I'm very happy with it
and more importantly, the client is happy with it.
But I can see that certain areas, specifically the white chocolate need a bit of local adjustment.
I always prefer to do that in Capture One.
In fact, I do all my processing in Capture One because you have more control because of the RAW files.
What I'll do is just zoom in. This is the chocolate and I just want a little more detail.
Zoom in on that straight away and using the adjustment layer I'm going to create another layer.
We are using the brush tool to mask out the area that we want.
As you can see it is going red now.
Using the normal exposure tab, the way you normally change the exposure on the whole shot,
this should now, using just layer 1, ever so slightly tone it down
so what you can see the lines coming back into the chocolate so we have got the definition.
And the client will be happy because it represents his chocolate better.
Once we have done that we can see it without the adjustment layer
just by removing it and you can see it looks much better.
The rest of the shot is well balanced.
All it leads me to do is to now process the shot and then, fantastic, save it and back it up.
We are on to the next shot. We have got a few shots to go.
These are a little bit simpler so these we can make in a good time.
I have been using Capture One Pro 8 now for about 5-6 months and it is fantastically stable.
It is a real asset to our current workflow.
It is very intuitive to use, it is very easy if you want it to be
and it really backs up how we work professionally within the studio.
That was the end of a very enjoyable day.
I think everyone was really happy.
Now I can just go home, put my feet up, getting ready to start all over again tomorrow.