Five years into her professional photography career, L.A.-based photographer Julia Stotz really started leaning into the work she loves—shooting still lifes. Ten years later, she’s flexed her creative muscles for brands such as Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, The New York Times and UberEats. “I love shooting still lifes because it’s a slower process,” Stotz says. “It feels so collaborative on set. I love moving props and considering colors, textures and composition and having all that control.”
While still-life photography may sound superficially straightforward—nothing’s moving, after all—there’s actually a lot more to it than meets the eye. We asked Stotz to break down how she approaches her still lifes. (Try not to salivate.)
GEAR
Stotz shoots with a Nikon D850 DSLR and lenses ranging from a AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G to a AF-S VR micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G. “Anything wider won’t really work for small objects,” she says. Stotz has leveraged the D850’s expansive ISO range both up and down the scale—shooting it as low as 32 and as high as 3200. “On location, at restaurants, I’ve shot food as high as 3200 ISO and I really do think [the image] holds up.” Having a high-resolution body like the D850 is “very important” to her work, she adds. “Many clients now want images to have a broad usage, which could be from packaging, to billboards, to social media. Clients also want to use images in many different formats, which means cropping verticals and squares from horizontals and so forth, which then narrows down the frame even more. I rely on the resolution of my camera’s capabilities a lot.”
She prefers flash to continuous lights for her work because they’re easy to take anywhere, easy to control and produce a “crisp light” that helps her accentuate the items she photographs.
Stotz keeps the camera locked on a tripod and also shoots tethered, which she says is important for most still-life shoots where clients, stylists, agencies are all on set. “If it’s a client with an agency, we’ll have a monitor in their section and I’ll work with a digital tech who can post images when we’re at the point we want to show them. It’s useful to get everyone on the same page.” When not shooting tethered, she’ll take advantage of the D850’s “really handy” tilting touch-screen to help shoot and focus overhead shots.
HERE COMES THE SUN
There’s no objectively correct way to light a still life, Stotz says. Instead, it depends on a variety of factors: the kind of food and props you’re shooting (are they throwing off reflections, melting quickly, etc.) and the effect you or the client is hoping to achieve. That said, there are some over-arching principles Stotz applies when approaching her food and still-life shoots. The first is to start with the sun as a reference point. Many still-life tableaux feature sunlight streaming onto an object, so Stotz will use her key (or principle) light as a stand in for the sun. It’s the first light to be positioned and everything flows from that.
The next question is whether the client wants hard, contrast-y light or something softer. If it’s greater contrast they want, Stotz says she’ll shoot her strobes bare-bulb with a reflector or a Fresnel, a focusable modifier. If they envision a softer light, she’ll place a silk in front of the flash or use an Octabox modifier for a more diffuse spread of light from her key source.
Once she’s established the type of light, she focuses on where the shadows should fall. If the shoot’s esthetic calls for long shadows, she’ll position her key light lower to the ground so it hits her objects laterally (or close to it). If shorter shadows are the order of the day, Stotz will raise the key light higher and angle it down.
The trick with shadows is that most clients don’t want them to be completely black, Stotz says. That means you’ll need a second fill flash to draw out detail in dark shadows. Stotz says her fill light is either set at a lower power or positioned further away from the set than the key light, though there’s no strict proportional relationship between the two lights. One thing to keep in mind, she says, is that the fill light shouldn’t be directly facing the scene where it’s most likely to reflect off of items.
EXPERIMENT, COLLABORATE
Most of the work Stotz does is deeply collaborative and frequently requires multiple adjustments during the shoot—repositioning food, props, lights and camera angles—as the team hones in on the final look. “We usually don’t have time to do a prelight, so I’m always moving lights, playing with the look,” Stotz observes. To shoot this kind of work, you need to be prepared to try and try again, she says. One of the main challenges is dealing with spectral highlights, or the reflection of light off shiny objects (like glassware). Stotz says that she aims to capture an authentic image in-camera and keep post-production retouching to a minimum. She tackles glare by repositioning lights and props. Sometimes glare can be minimized simply by making the key light a backlight (i.e. positioning it to the rear of the scene). That said, she’s found that the D850 has an “incredible range within post-production. The highlight and shadow recovery are really broad, and it allows for files to be processed in a really beautiful way in post because of its latitude.”
IT’S EASY TO START: WORK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE
Still-life photography is one of the best genres to learn because the requisite supplies are always on hand, Stotz says. “Everyone has a small table and random objects. If you don’t have lights, look at your windows, see which way they’re facing and observe when you get the best light coming through and play with that. You can do so much with flags and bounce cards to create a vignette in your own space.”
When it comes to propping, Stotz suggests playing with textures, colors and objects to see “how they interact with the light. That’s the main thing your viewers will be drawn to.” Look to create a variety of objects, shapes, colors and textures and see how they “carve the light,” Stotz says. “That’s what the eye is drawn to and that’s what creates a dynamic still life.”
By Greg Scoblete. Read more in the Fall 2019 issue of PDNedu.
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