After a few weeks of hardcore baking and a million different setups, I’ve gotten all nine photos ready for post-production. One thing I’ve learnt from this process is that food photography or ‘commercial’ style photography is a lot harder than it seems. I think it’s regarded as a less artistic version of photography because there’s less room for creative license but I would have to disagree. I’ve learnt that it requires meticulous detail and keen sense of balance within the frame and that sometimes you need to try a hundred different lighting angles before you find the best one. I tried to incorporate all of the different techniques that help create more appealing food photography shots that I mentioned back in Week 6. In regards to shooting specifically for Instagram and maintaining a theme or aesthetic for a grid, I found the use of colour to be one of the most important aspects to be aware of but found as well that sometimes a subtle hint of colour is the better option.

I’ve edited all my photos in Lightroom Classic but really only altered the light effects to make them brighter and more vibrant. After editing a few different photos, I decided to actually make my own preset so that all the photos would be more cohesive and also speed up my editing time. I decided to keep the photos bright and summery to keep in the theme of an Aussie Christmas.  Last week, I mentioned that I was interested in creating a stop motion video to create some movement on the grid, which I decided to go ahead with and made it on photoshop. I’m pretty happy with the result however it doesn’t play automatically when users are looking at the profile as a whole, it only plays when you scroll through the photos so that’s kind of defeated the purpose of it – but I’m proud of it so it’s staying!

Probably the task that took me the most amount of time in post what deciding on which order to post the photos in. On iPhones, if you add all photos to a specific album, you can move photos around to how they would look best next to each other as seen below. I found this to be a very useful tool before uploading to make my grid look as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

 

I added a fun little sentence to the start of each caption and then added the recipes underneath (with credits of course) to tie the whole project together. I also added a few hashtags to distribute it further across the network and see if it could generate any views or likes.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my final project, there are of course little things that I would change if I was to shoot again and set ups that I think would work better but it’s a learning process and I can definitely say that this course has taught me a lot about the usefulness of photography.

Find my project at : coloursofchristmas