How to take food photos with indoor natural light

Lead: Sometimes I always want to take a picture of baking snacks or handmade small things to share with you, but how to take a good picture? Learn to use indoor natural light with some proper props, so that you can shoot excellent works with high praise rate even at home.

Large aperture fixed focus lens: making beautiful shallow depth of field

The intensity of indoor natural light varies according to the window size and shooting time. In any case, it is better to shoot with a large aperture fixed-focus lens above F2.8, which can ensure shooting in low light environment on the one hand, and easy to shoot beautiful shallow depth of field on the other hand, creating an aesthetic effect of separating the foreground and background of sketch photography.

A large aperture fixed-focus lens is used to shoot life sketches because it can create beautiful scattered scenes.

Find the prime time and place to shoot.

With the change of the position of the sun, the intensity and angle of light outside the window are different, which will produce different effects. Find a chance to observe the light coming in from your window. When is your favorite or best time to take pictures? Or there are many windows in different directions at home, and different window lights are selected for shooting according to different time periods and seasons.

Throughout the year, the direction of sunshine is different from morning till night. Have you found the golden moment of your window lamp?

Make full use of window elements such as curtains or shutters.

Windows at home often have different kinds of curtains to match, and some may have special pendants. Can these elements create some special effects when shooting? For example, when some curtains are closed, they can produce different colors of light, and the shadows projected by the light through the blinds are also unique. If there are transparent colored pendants on the window, the light and shadow projection will be different.

The color of light obtained by curtain cloth with different colors is also different.

Pay attention to the adjustment of white balance settings to avoid light mixing.

Generally, indoor shooting is carried out in sunny conditions, and it is not necessary to set the white balance to daylight mode, but if there is a color temperature tester, the white balance can be mastered more accurately. Of course, there is no color temperature tester, and you can also find a white object as a standard to facilitate the white balance adjustment of RAW files. In addition, try to interfere with the color mixing of other lights. When shooting with natural light outside the window, it is suggested to turn off the original indoor lighting and use natural light as the only light source, which can increase the stereoscopic effect of the subject or create a high contrast effect. If there is transparent color decoration on the window, we can make better use of the color light and shadow it projects.

Too much mixed light will confuse the color of the picture and affect the lighting effect.

Learn to "adjust" the light

Although natural light itself is "dead", our camera is "alive" and we can use some small means to "adjust" the natural light coming in from the window. For example, curtains can be used to reduce the light intensity, and some friends will be used to adding a translucent gauze curtain to the curtains, which can be used to soften the light. But the most basic thing is to control the light through the exposure settings in the camera. When shooting with a tripod, the exposure can only be controlled by adjusting the shutter value. If you shoot by hand, you may need to adjust the brightness to ensure the ideal exposure effect within a safe shutter speed. If you feel that the light is too hard and there are no suitable window elements to use, try to move the subject away from the window to make the light incident on the subject less concentrated.

If you think the contrast of the subject is too strong, you can also use white cardboard as a reflector, facing the direction of light projection, so that part of the light hits the subject in the opposite direction to enhance the brightness of the shadow.

Arrange the appropriate background

Although it was shot by natural light at the window, it doesn't mean that the window must be in the mirror. According to the style and atmosphere you want to create, choose the appropriate background, such as paper, curtains, boards, etc. , are all available materials. Proper decoration with some small things can make the picture richer and more interesting.

You can choose a simple material with the same color as the main body as the background.

When the subject itself is rich in color, a simple background is needed to avoid clutter.