Ok - this food photography business has really started irritating me. Why? Well I can't seem to get it right, and my efforts still look crap compared with even the cheapest book illustrations. I've got the bit between my teeth now though. I don't plan on becoming a food photographer, but as someone who takes his photography fairly seriously, I reckon I ought to be able to do better.

There are two clear aspects to this. One is the technical photographic side, which brings it's own unique challenges. The other is the presentation of the actual food itself. In this post I'm going to concentrate on the former

In the last post on this subject I was muttering about DOF problems. Now I should do a lot more experimentation, finding out the limits of DOF with various lenses and aperture settings, But the next thing I did was just to stop down the next shot to f8, that should be enough, normally gets me from 15 feet to the andromeda galaxy with my Summicron 50mm. However closeups are different.

Now I know you're thinking "this guy only eats steamed fish and spinach - must be real fit and healthy", If that was all I ate - yes. So this was quickly shot and eaten - f8 as I said before. Well the bad news is that there's only about the width of of a slice of prosciutto in focus

Now I was getting annoyed, so I did a bit of research. DOF in this situation is not ever going to be enough, not with ordinary equipment. So, how do people do it. Well the professionals probably use a view camera with tilt/shift capabilities. I don't think I'm going down that route. I had a look at tilt/shift lenses for Canon, but I don't think I can justify those just to satisfy my curiosity, However I found another solution, or compromise.

There are some software programs out there that will take a series of photographs taken at different focus distances, and stitch them together into one über photo with unlimited DOF. A bit like HDR techniques for exposure. I had a look at one "HeliconFocus" and it really does work. (heliconfilter.com/pages/)

Here is an ordinary photograph, taken at f8

And here is one after the HeliconFocus processing. This consists of taking multiple images focussing gradually from the front to the back of the subject in small increments.

It's maybe difficult to see the extent of the difference from these small images, but it definitely works and doesn't seem to lose any image quality. Here are some crops which show how the DOF is improved in more detail. The first image was focused pretty much on the front of the subject

Now the composite image - sorry about the difference in colour and contrast

I didn't take a lot of care over it, just 6 different focus points and it looks as though I missed the front focus point altogether, but I think the improvement is quite clear. Probably would take a lot more "slices" if I was doing it seriously. This piece of software is well worth a look at if you need to solve this kind of problem. Looks as though it was developed for technical applications like microscopy, but works for these product type shots.

So I'm going to persevere now - next time I'm going to start concentrating on the actual subject matter. For that reason probably best not to use something I'm going to immediately eat