garygilliland:

I’ve just finished a photo shoot for a local bakery. I don’t normally do product photography but the owner is friend and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. Two days and 60 different cakes, biscuits, buns and tarts later I think I’ve learned a few lessons

1. It takes longer than you think. Cleaning, preparing the food, creating and lighting each shot is a slower process than you imagine. Give it time and do it right. Carefully slice and present each item, when you’re serving tea and cake to your aunt you don’t mind the odd the crumb on the plate or a slightly wonky slice but in photographs these stop being invisible and suddenly become glaringly obvious.
2. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Food is messy so get more crockery, cutlery etc to avoid having to wash up between shots. Clean the area thoroughly after each shot, crumbs and stains can go unnoticed until you’re reviewing the final output on the large screen of a computer. Wash your hands, you’re not going to be eating the food but greasy finger prints etc can still show up in the photograph.
3. Don’t sample the merchandise. A little piece of each cake seems harmless but the cumulative effect isn’t good.
4. Use cold tea and coffee, steam doesn’t photograph well unless there’s lots of it and if you’re shooting relatively close it will fog the lens. Also tea should be strong and coffee should be black. Coffee with milk looks like tea and weak tea when combined with milk and photographic lighting can look like dish water.
5. The food is the centre piece so keep the set simple, patterns and bright colours draw attention away from the food and make it appear bland and monotone.
6. Keep props appropriate for the product. Showing single biscuit amongst a dozen cups looks mean. A whole cake and single cup looks lonely and depressing.
7. You’re shooting food not the room. It may aesthetically appealing to show the food in the context of a beautifully decorated table, in a pristine room it won’t help the food. Your purpose is to highlight the food so get in close and use a props to give the impression of surroundings you want.
8. Ensure that the product looks generous. Stylishly over sized cups make the product look small, using saucers rather than plates makes portions look bigger. If the portions look mean then double up, cut more generous slices etc.
9. Leave some space in each finished shot for text, logos etc. It’s easier to crop excess space than to add it in after the fact.
10. Get your exposure right. Cream, sugar crystals, icing etc need to be properly exposed for their texture to show through so under rather over expose. Under exposure also ensures that the colours looks richer.
11. Use a grey card. The colour of food is important so get the white balance correct. If in doubt set your camera white balance for a warmer setting, this stop the food looking cold and blue.
12. Food is static so there’s no need for fast shutter speeds. Use a tripod and set up for low ISO shots. The noise reduction associated with high ISO shots will kill the texture on most food and make it look like a plastic replica.
13. Ensure that you have enough depth of field. Keep areas of soft focus for prop items, the food should be sharp. I used a long table for the shoot so with the camera stopped down I could keep the food in focus and push the props further away to create a soft background.
14. Above all have fun, mix it up. Shooting every single item in exactly the same way is boring for the photographer and the viewer. In this case I used different vertical angles sometimes directly above and in other cases almost parallel to this table. I also dressed the set for different scenarios, a party, tea for two, quiet cuppa etc.

The start of this years veggie harvest. I love the feeling of walking past the vegetable section in the supermarket knowing that I’ve got better fresher, cheaper stuff at home.

Avinash Kaushik from Marketing Profs Daily Fix has pointed out a rule that younger professionals would do well to remember. Although the article talks about it in the context of websites, it’s pretty much universal for all types of projects and ideas.

“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site. “

HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Most young professionals live under the mistaken belief that their opinion matters and their good ideas will be taken on merit. Sadly this, generally, isn’t the case. Time and bitter experience will teach you, if the idea doesn’t gel with the thoughts of the HiPPO then it probably won’t happen. There doesn’t need to be a good logical, business or operational reason. It’s just human nature. They’re having a bad day, don’t want to be undermined by a junior, they’re pursuing their own agenda, etc.

The most successful solution to this that I’ve done and had done to me is the ‘uniced cake’. Take the idea to the HiPPO, present 99% of it and explain you have difficulties in making it a winning solution. Unless they are genuinely opposed to the idea in any form then the general reaction is that they add the icing and push the idea through whilst taking some or all of the credit. You’ve validated their position as the expert, the idea has been approved and hopefully you’ve scored a few points in the HiPPO’s good book.

I know it disheartening to discover that the authority figures in your organisation are sometimes no better than petulant children but the sooner you grasp that simple fact the sooner you can start to make a difference.

From Experiment or Go Home

Thanks to El for pointing me to this article.

In today’s Guardian George Monbiot has written about the problems he envisages with the government’s plans to introduce a feed-in tariff for domestic renewable energy sources. The facts and politics of the piece are the subject for discussion elsewhere but the piece that intrigued me was his comment on how criminals would take advantage of the system.

“it can’t be long before thousands of petty criminals discover the perfect carousel fraud, bypassing their solar panels by connecting the incoming wire to the outgoing wire. By buying electricity for 7p and selling it for 44p (if you sell power to the grid rather than using it yourself, you get an extra 3p), they’ll make a 600% profit. Amazingly the government has decided not to measure how much electricity people are selling, but "to pay export tariffs on the basis of estimated (deemed) exports". Elsewhere in its report it boasts of "encouraging a risk-based approach to audit and assurance"”

This is still in the realms of theory but nonetheless it’s a brilliant example of criminal creativity.

via http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff

There’s a physicality to turntables and a connection to the music that isn’t available with other media. The ritual of picking out an album, sliding the record out of its sleeve, cleaning the disc and then putting it on the platter. As the record spins up I lift the arm across the blank space before the first track. There’s a few crackles and pops, then the music begins, twenty or so minutes listening to the music as a single piece, the way the artist intended.

Compare this to an Ipod, it’s more advanced, more convenient, more robust but it’s cold. Press a button, the music comes out in an endless stream sorted by genre, artist or date. I don’t need the discipline of listening to difficult tracks, I just click next until I get something easier to consume.

When my nephew and niece come to stay they don’t ask for the Ipod, they ask for the “disco”, aka the turntable. Like me they seem to be fascinated with the rituals involved in playing the music. Then when the music’s playing the slow spin of the disc holds them entranced.

Sonically it’s prone to pops and clicks. Records get scratched or warped and yet still the warm imperfect sound is more comforting than the consistent reproduction of a CD or MP3.

Who knew dead flies were funny? Apparently Swedish photographer Magnus Muhr did because he has started to make cartoons using dead flies as the protagonists.

MUHR PHOTOGRAPHY

I recently digitised some old videotapes that I thought my brother might be interested in seeing and showing to other people. Instead of simply being able to send it directly to his phone I had to go through multiple steps, convert the video format to something a Nokia could play (apparently Nokia’s can’t play all types of MP4), copy the files to a USB stick because they were too big to upload to the web, copy the files onto his laptop and finally upload to the phone. This started me thinking about how bad connectivity and integration is for most consumer technology.

The average consumer now manages a considerable technology infrastructure; televisions, cable / satellite boxes, broadband, wifi, digital cameras, media players, mobile phones, computers, printers, scanners, consoles etc, etc.

With multiple operating systems, applications, web platforms and file formats the average user has little chance of ever extracting the full benefit from their technology. Even apparently simple tasks like ensuring that media is playable across a range of devices or ensuring that their files and settings are synced between devices is beyond most.

Advances in technology are impressive but in truth most people don’t need more megapixels, more cores or more features. The average person is seeing diminishing returns from new devices, software etc not because the technology is failing but because new devices are adding layers of incompatibility and complexity. New file formats, connectors, software, batteries, chargers etc. All of which notionally add functionality and improve on the previous generation. Alternatively they make older peripherals redundant, require relearning of simple tasks or mandate conversion of existing media.

The time honoured answer from geeks and manufacturers is that we should be awed by the new features or RTFM. Surely we’ve moved past that.

When I buy a device I want to buy it because it’s right for me and not because it happens to support a particular file format, DRM system or because it has the right connector for another piece of hardware. We need manufacturers and developers to offer standards which are designed to assist the consumer, not standards which consolidate market position and secure user lock in.We need devices and software which work together, communicate effectively and add value to existing infrastructure.

At the Mac World conference filmmaking students asked Kevin Smith how succeed in film making. His answer pretty much covered how to succeed in any creative endeavour.

“I’d make one.

Make one that everybody likes.

What do you think happened? Think I was standing over a virgin holding a necronomicon?

The trick is to make something everybody digs.”

There’s great power in what smart people call stupid.

Stupid people ask questions. Stupid people break the rules. Stupid people are dreamers. Stupid people try things. Stupid people believe they can change world.

The Be Stupid campaign by Diesel captures it perfectly.

CES gave us 3D TV, which as far as I’m aware means that instead of being just dull, TV will now be pointy and dull. Not having tested any of the devices I might be missing something and the glasses might just contain pixie dust that magically transforms dross into gold but to me it seems that falling TV audiences are more to with the quality of programmes than the quality of the presentation.

Ebooks readers or tablet computers can’t save the publishing industry. The majority of people don’t consume long form writing of any kind so the ability to carry 150 books and the entire history of your favourite newspaper seem irrelevant. The arrival of the web and 24 hour news coverage that the newspapers have shifted from purveyors of news to become gossip and propaganda sheets. To survive the publishing industry needs to change what is presented, not how and when it’s presented.

As far technology and media companies are concerned the phrase "content is king" seems to be dead. Today “style over content” is the new mantra. Tell everyone it’s the future, design it to look good and you’ll have a hit. Surely consumers aren’t stupid enough to fall for that? Are they?