Lessons
Class Introduction
05:06 2Composition, Props & Angle
14:28 3Shoot: Cake with Flowers - Creating a Story
29:11 4Shoot: Waffle with Syrup - Capturing Movement
23:53 5Shoot: Granola - Simple to Complex
11:06 6Image Review - Crafting Your Story
25:16 7Culling Images
11:11 8Editing Images in Lightroom
18:37Lesson Info
Class Introduction
(audience applauding) Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me here. It's really an honor to be with you, our audience that's live outside and our audience here in the studio. It's lovely to see all of your faces and really for Creative Live to welcome me here. It's such an honor. And yes, that's right, my latest book, Cuban Flavor is available a little bit on Amazon and bookstores near you. It has sold out in three weeks, but it's re-released in June, so you can pre-order it now. We're just gonna get started a little bit. This first image is from my latest book. It's a compilation image. That's something that I will be talking to you about today. This class is to teach you how to get the best photos you can from blogging and social media, and it's to show you what you can do just in your home, and how to make an image perfect. Here we go, I'll show you a few more images. I got started as a food photographer, because I really began my career photographing portraits, weddings, ne...
wspaper. I was a photojournalist for a long time. Some of the people that I would photograph would be in restaurants and bars. In that course of time, I really fell in love with food. It became a passion of mine. I think it had always been something that I was so immersed in, as a child growing up in Sonoma County. Food's such a way of life there. I started to photograph food in a little bit of a different way from most people. I was always photographing behind the scenes. I was in the kitchen. I was photographing, where did the food come from? Going to the farmers market. Photographing the food plated. What happens after it's plated? You're eating it. What does the restaurant look like? What's the staff look like? What's the interior look like? I was telling an entire story, because my background was in journalism. That is really the trend now that you'll find in social media. You'll see a lot of people embracing an entire story. Today I'm going to speak a little bit too, about components of a story, and also help you set up some beautiful shots that you can do easily on your own without a huge team, which is really important to be, you know, brand consistency, lighting. Those are key components to get your blog and your social media pages just to the tops, where they can be seen by everyone. So, brand consistency, personal brand consistency. What does that mean? That's really something that will make your social media platform stand out against other brands. You want similar colors. You want similar imagery. You create a story where everything looks consistent. Pink cake, so let's have it, let's start. We're going to start with our cake today. We have our pink cake, and then maybe skip a few images in your social media platform, but then you have also the pink background. You keep pink streaming through, if that's a key color for you. Maybe it's red, maybe it's blue. Let's think about colors. Let's think about shapes that we can replicate through many of our images. Here are some more images. This is from a cookbook I did years ago. It's called Tomatoes. The whole, entire cookbook was about tomatoes. It's important to get a variety of shots. We'll be focusing on things that are plated, and then things that are made up elements of a dish. You'll see how to deconstruct a dish, and you can show that throughout your Instagram or your blog. That tells a story. How did it start? How did it finish? It's important to show props. This is something, if you work with great props, that's already a great start to keeping your food images come to life. Quality is really important. You wanna be thinking about every detail. Think about the quality of your food. Think about the quality of your prepping. We'll talk more about that. Today we'll talk a bit about lighting, composition, subject material, styling, color scheme, and storytelling. Tomatoes, back to tomatoes. You can always get something great from a farmers market. How many of you are, raise just a show of hands. How many of you are already photographing food? Great, so that's more than half of our audience. That's fantastic. Do you find it, raise your hands again. Do you find yourselves going to farmers markets for great produce? Yeah, just a few of you. I'll really encourage you to do that, and you can see in some of my imagery how you can just add to your portfolio by gathering something as simple as tomatoes, and putting it together, and then suddenly you have a beautiful image. Now you have something that really is strong and it's. You can plate it afterwards too. Look how simple that is. You just slice up some tomatoes. There you go. Very simple, but it's really beautiful. It's something that you can do in your food photography on your blog or your Instagram. It's so easy. That's really what I'm wanting to teach you, is how easy you can do something and make it very beautiful.
Ratings and Reviews
JennMercille
Liza Gershman is not only an amazing artist, she is an excellent educator. In this course, she goes beyond teaching the basics of interesting composition. She factors in the connection between food and culture, and the role that it plays in storytelling as a visual artist. She demonstrates how to draw upon the story of a dish, to showcase it with an authenticity that will set you apart and elevate your art. This was a wonderful class, and absolutely worth owning! Thank You Liza!
Florence Grunfelder
Liza gave a good overview of the steps involved in shooting food - from choosing the props, selecting the pictures to editing in Lightroom. This is a good course for someone getting started in food photography.