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When you are looking for illustrations for books, book covers, and magazines, you want clear photos, with a defined amount in focus, be it arty out of focus, or what we prefer the whole plate and food or main subject perfectly sharp, with only the background  blurred. You want to colours bright and correct, and a photographer able to work efficiently at speed and using equipemnt that does not destroy the potential. You will also often be trying to do this on a limited budget.

Food photography is in many ways the most difficult photography to do really well, and few really excel in this area. We have for some years now trained food photography to professional photographers, and it was this and the challenges they encountered that created our interest. 

The challenge to get a really good food photograph breaks into 4 parts

• Producing the quality product
• Food styling, the arranging and the magic tricks to make food look better or photograph better
• Artistic vision or specification of what is required
• The food photography, which has to be done quite quickly, and got technically right , theirs little room for trial and error

We can undertake the last of these or more, in fact all except the first one, we still need a product to start with. we can work with artistic designers, food stylist, but we are also happy to work with authors, where they produce the food, and together we undertake the styling, or out how it will look good and we take care of the technical part of capturing the image and editing it if necessary.

We can work in our home, yes its a home with a large well equipped kitchen and other large rooms, not an industrial unit or warehouse, we can work in your premises, or we can hire a studio, depending on the need and the budget that you wish to invest.

Many authors, who are also producing the food find it easier to produce the ideal product in their own environment, using the equipemnt they know well, and we al know that no too ovens produce exactly the same effect. Often they are not familiar with industrial scale equipemnt and the product sample they are producing is relatively small, not designed to feed a large number of people. For this reason it often makes sense for us to pack up our kit and come to you.

Our rate card prices are not much different to others, but we do more for this, and can get a greater work flow through than most simply because we have the technical ability to capture some of the most difficult images well. we may still want to shoot some steps several times, but this will rarely be because we had a technical problem capturing the image.

Some of the techniques are fairly straight forward like colour management to get the colour right, lighting the scene correctly, and i we had to select one are that we can handle better than just about anyone else it would  be the sharpness and focus. With us you have what you want sharp, we would susest that everything at the front of the image, plate, food and anything else featured should be sharp, and only peripheral items and background out of focus by design, we can have this in focus as well if you like. We have no limit to what you can have in focus, and similarly what is not, its all done by design. You may have been told before that you cannot technically get depth of field to get all that you would like in focus, but we can overcome this.

We can use flash, but often we like to use cool lights with softboxes, these we can fold down and bring with us, they have no heat and are switchable to a variety of brightness, with these we can see images on a  laptop computer connected to our camera BEFORE we take them, with the lighting as it will appear.

Every author has to have first time and this may be yours, however we can make it as easy as possible for you to succeed, we have an information pack for authors we wend out in advance, that has a lot of tips, explains how things work and also includes a 5 page food styling handout explaining the magic tricks used to make food look good in photographs, you an decide what you want to use and what you do not.  Some of these styling trucks are using substitutes that make the food uneditible, for example a cereal advert photo may not want to use milk as the serial goes soggy so PVA glue can be used instead.

The best time to talk to us is as early in your project as you can, particularly if your budget is limited. We really want you to see the difference that good photography can make, and may be able to solve any problems that arise including limited budgets. So email or phone us as soon as you can even if you have not yet reached the point where you know wheat it is that you want to photograph precisely.

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