Expanded Food Photography (Alternative Method)

Welcome to my version of a favorite trick food photography method.

I've been meaning to add this project since I saw that there is another photography contest running, and here I am on the last day typing an instructable after my regular bed time!

This is actually a fairly old project of mine, I took these photos for my wife (then still girlfriend) back in August 2020. In fact it was two days before we got engaged.

She was training as a chef and she needed photos for a project she was working on and I offered to help. She asked if I was able to do something like this based on an old ad she had seen long ago. I told I will make it happen and then had to think of a way to actually do it.

I thought of a few ways to go about it, and I see now a fellow Author has actually made one on another method. Kudos to andimadethings for your method, it turned out great! Here is the link if you would like to check it out! https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-Food-Float/

In this method you utilize wire to keep the food up and then use the magic of photoshop to remove the strings. Certainly a great way of doing things.

However, given the nature of the ingredients I was working with, this option would not work as well. The avocado or the onions for example will not stay on top of the strings as well as the firmer ingredients. Of course you could work around it by place a small object underneath it and hiding it with the food.

There are still some more issues with this method.

• We did a whole shoot with the burger after constructing it, so this means that using string would require us "constructing" the burger twice. Once on the wire and then again on a plate.
• My wife wanted the pieces to look as though was lying on top of the other food, not completely flat.
• The wire method can get messy with the softer foods, and we were shooting in a living room.

All of this is why I decided to stack the burger layer for layer and taking pictures along the way then cropping in post.

Unfortunately the last picture above is all I have to showcase what I used during this shoot. I will break up the supplies in what you need and what you could use extra.

Need:

• Camera
• Subject
• Post production software (I use Affinity Photo by Seriff, very affordable and you can get a free trial. No I am not affiliated with them, I am just a fan of there work)

Strongly recommended:

• Tripod. Tripod. Tripod. This is just for photography in general, tripods are amazing. Any way, here it will really help to take an practically identical image 7 times in a row. The tripod will hold your position.
• A camera with a manual mode and focus control (like a lens on which you can shut off autofocus). Again, nothing must change between photos.
• Lighting, I used flashes and umbrella diffusers. You can use whatever you have or are comfortable with, but fixed lighting yet again helps with consistency.
• A backdrop. I used this cool brick tile example board my dad uses for his tiling business. The black cloth was just to keep away unnecessary light.

The first thing I did was set up my space, lights and camera. I moved couches out of the way, took a test shot or two with my controlled lighting to get my exposure right. I then set up the framing and the focus. Now I just had to take the pictures.

Now that I was ready to take my picture, my wife started building a burger layer by layer and I simply took a picture in between each addition.

However, the patty was covered by the greenery, so i had to take a separate photo of the patty on the same plank to get the correct angle and lighting once I composited it all.

• I started by opening up all the photos in my program. For demonstration purposes, I only used the first 2 images now.
• I layered my images in the same order as the burger layers: the first photo at the bottom with the last at the top.
• I then hid all the images and started revealing the next layer I had to work on.
• Using the selection brush I carefully went over whichever part I wanted for my photo. I this case I selected the greenery. I then pressed refine to complete my selection.
• The selected part is viewed in normal color and everything else is shown with a red filter over it. I then selected the output to create a "new layer".
• I now had a new layer which consisted of only the leaves, I could hide, or even delete the original layer from the document.
• I continued to do this with all the other layers until I had the full burger. I could now play around with how far I wanted to layers apart (where with the wire it is much more fixed). I also cropped the image to where I thought it looked good. I also added some shadows over the back of the layers to give the photo at least some of sense of realism.

And now you have an expanded view of an already constructed

burger!

I decided not to go into detail about the tools I was uses during editing as everyone uses different software. I just wanted to give you the general idea with the hope that I inspire you to go play around with your own software and see how it works.

Let me know if you try this and feel free to ask if you wanted to know any more of the specific details on how I did something.

Also, remember to go check out the wire method: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-Food-Float/

Thanks for reading, and give a vote if you enjoyed it!

Go check out my profile for a wide range of other projects!