Food: Summer Dinner Dishes

Watertown, MA 060910 Dishes for a story on summer dinners. Photographed at the Boston Globe's food editor's home. The dishes are grilled lobster, corn chowder, roasted chicken, jambalaya and baked ham. (Essdras M Suarez/ Boston Globe)/ G/ Food. BEHIND THE SCENES: Shooting at the editors home entails bringing a studio on location. She has all the props you can think of and she is heavily involved in the styling of the photos. I get there and I'm told what needs to be photographed and how it is going to be used which in turn will dictate the way the dishes will be shot. All I'm responsible for is to light it properly and some minor aspects of composition. TECH STUFF: lens 100macro 2.8, iso 100ASA, speed max synch 320th of a second, aperture is about 2.8- 3.5. Light system Elite 1200 pack and I used two lights for this one. One from behind to the left at 45 degrees and one across from it in the front and to the right. I used neutral density gels on both lights in order to cut the output down to be able to use the shallow depth of field. This battery pack has three possible output power: 300, 600 and 1200 watts. These were shot at 300 with the gels taking the output down -2 stops in the one in the front and -1 stop on the back light. This gave me the feeling of strong window sunlight streaming from behind the dishes. EXTRA: The lobsters were shot with a hand held strobe to the left and behind held about 1.5 foot away and at about 45 degrees.