We did the first ever professional studio food photography assignment with a mobile phone!
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you probably know that in addition to a food blog and a Wedding Photography business, we also run a professional food photography studio. Arjun & I are one of the few photographers in Delhi who specialise in food and actively work with brands to create mouthwatering food images for their marketing and communication needs.
One of the things we’ve been fascinated with is how mobiles phones are redefining photography. Will the mobile phone ever replace the DSLR? It may be something to laugh at today, but who knows what will happen five or ten years later? As it happened, when Samsung got in touch with us, they challenged us to shoot professional images of food using the new Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is low-light conditions. Initially, we were more than a little sceptical of the idea but we are never afraid of a challenge! We love pushing the boundaries of what has been done before and coming up with something new altogether. So we put our mind to it and decided that we would give it a try and make it work.
The first challenge we had to work through was shooting food in the dark without flash because a phone cannot be used to trigger studio lights or flashes. So we had to say goodbye to our lovely octagonal softbox (which we love for food) and start thinking how we could shoot images without controlled light, and to make this complicated – in the dark! Luckily, the phone is able to shoot in manual mode, so so we knew the could use a long exposure to get the image looking the way we wanted. The next thing we needed to figure out was how to hook the phone up to our tripod. A quick search on Amazon found us this little thingummyjig which worked like a charm! This hooked out to our heavy Manfrotto tripod, and we were all set for business.
We selected food items that would resonate with most of you, our readers – readily available fast or street food, using these as examples so that you can try these out with your own phones as a comparison. Here are a few of the photographs we took during the one-day shoot.
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 0.3 second exposure, ISO 100
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 0.3 second exposure, ISO 100
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 1/6 second exposure, ISO 100
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 1/4 second exposure, ISO 100
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 1/10 second exposure, ISO 100
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 1/1500 second exposure, ISO 800
Samsung Galaxy S7 in manual, f1.7, 1/1500 second exposure, ISO 800
All things considered, we were pleasantly surprised to see the final output. We really wouldn’t have guessed that you CAN (in 2016!) actually use a mobile phone to create professional food imagery that can easily be used for a client website or brochure. We are quite excited about the outcome – what do you think?
Arjun & Praerna run a boutique food photography studio in NCR and are available for photography assignments locally as well as anywhere else in India and abroad.