The Moist and Tasty Pork Chop....

Nothing says summer, like grillin'...

A griller's choice and challenge,


     An outdoor feel was a must for this summery shot. To keep control, but still have the natural light look from an afternoon sky, we placed a point light source to come from the back right. This light gave us direction and also produced all the specular highlights on the chop.

By doing this, our indoor set became a realistic afternoon sky with a controlled, simulated sun. To create the look of a natural light, you can't just create a sun, you also have to create a sky. We put a large white flat behind the set and wrapping around towards the left, thus creating a sky-like impression and producing a large, unbroken highlight on the sauce. Since the front was going a little dark, we filled in with a mirror to light the front and captured the delectable details of both the meat and potatoes. 

The shoot was fun, fragrant and we all spent a lot of time licking our lips.

White BBQ Pulled Chicken Pizza...

Pizza comes many different ways.  Size, shape, layering, are all something that are different depending on where you are in the country.

A unique White BBQ sauce accents this wonderful pizza.

Chicagoans traditionally think pizza is thick, hearty and the sauce goes on top.  Other Chicagoans think pizza should be on a thin cracker like crust.  This particular recipe is a lot lighter and had more of a crisp taste to it, thus we wanted to keep the crust thin.

The product has a lot going on with it, so we wanted to keep everything else simple and clean.  Our client had this wonderfully weathered pizza stone, and it was an obvious choice when propping to use it.   We had a very large soft light source coming in from the right, to give us our main light direction.  We also had a soft light source coming from directly behind to help give some incidence on the surface and parts of the pizza that have a sheen.

To add some interest, we put a glass shower block on the surface to play with the soft light.  That glass block is giving us the white incidence on the back right of the frame.  The left side of the fame then got empty and dark, so we put a small measuring cup of parmesan cheese to break up that negative space.  We didn't want our shot to be completely flat with soft light, so we brought in a point source from the back left to punch up the contrast and make the shot come alive.

The front of the shot was going darker than we would have liked, so we put a white card on the front left to reflect some of our main light coming from the right, then used a hand held mirror on the front right to reflect the point source light back onto a desired part of the product.