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​Photo Photography

For this assignment, I was to take 20 photos of various different food products, editing them in Photoshop to create two variants: one large-sized and another thumbnail-sized, the two kinds of photos you’d see in an eCommerce style website.

bakery_coconut_cream_pie.jpg

​This assignment was part of a much larger project I was doing in New Media Production & Design: creating an Ecommerce Site with products to sell to give the illusion of an actual website. This part of Visual Communications involved me taking photos with my DSLR camera of the products I wanted to put on our website, both as large (800px) and thumbnail size (350px). I then edited them in Photoshop to clean up the images and enhance color and lighting.

My eCommerce site was a bakery-style one, so I chose foods you’d expect in a bakery, like cake, bronies, pie, and all that stuff. Initially, I was going to pick out some simple foods like doughnuts and cookies and other variations, similar to the products of shops like Tim Hortons, but I decided to pick out more unique products to make my site stand out more. There were the ones I’d picked out:

  • Chocolate Strawberries

  • Ice Cream Cookie Sandwiches

  • Cheddar Bagels

  • Cinnamon Rolls

  • Boston Cream Doughnut

  • Danish Strawberry Cream Cheese Croissant

  • Croissant

  • Lemon Cupcakes

  • Churros

  • Coconut Cream Pie

  • Snickerdoodles

  • Brownies

  • Blueberry Muffin

  • Marble Coffee Cake

  • Lemon Meringue Pie

  • Frosted Sugar Cookie

  • Banana Bread

  • Onion Bagel

  • Chocolate Chip Cookies

  • Mango Cake

I managed to buy all these products from shops like Walmart and Safeway, though, for specific items like the cheddar and onion bagels or the mango cake, I couldn’t find any products that fit with their title, so I had to improvise. For the bagels, I decorated them with foods to match their flavors (cheese for cheddar bagels and onion for onion bagels). As for the mango cake, I had to buy a simple lemon cake and change the colors in Photoshop to more orangy yellow to sell the illusion it was mango cake. As for the strawberries, I simply bought regular strawberries and poured some chocolate sauce over them.

For the white background, I simply used a large sheet of paper I found at the dollar store and put it behind a table and stack of boxes while lying half against and half down on the floor. While taking the images shouldn’t have been difficult, I ran into some issues when I decided I wanted the photos to look similar to the products from actual sites, which were all taken from an angel looking down. Because I didn’t have a tripod back then, let alone one small enough to achieve that effect, I used to use a bucket and a stack of books to achieve this effect.

This had the issue of the Camera not being still as I took the photo, even by a slight inch, as I had to retake the images to gain the right constituency constantly, rearranging my makeshift stand from using a plastic bucket to just using a few stacks of book. Lighting was also an issue as sometimes the photos were pretty lit or as dim as the room I was shooting in. Eventually, I had to rectify it in Photoshop with the lighting. As for photo consistency, I managed to get the camera in a consistent pose and get through all my products quickly.

​Editing was straightforward as I removed slight blemishes from the footing while using vibrance and contrast lighting to improve the lighting of the images and ensure consistency throughout all the photos, as mentioned above, with the lighting problems.

Despite all the trouble I went through, I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out, and I hope I can get the chance to show off my editing skills in another future project.

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