Blog Photo Tips/Tricks: Behind the Photo Blog Hop

For the most part, I consider myself to be a pretty creative and crafty kind of person. I really want to be able to share that side of me and post about the projects, crafts, recipes, and other creative organization ideas I have. The problem is that most of the time when I attempt to do this I discover that the photos I’ve taken of the project didn’t quite come out as great as I had hoped. Some are so bad, in fact, that I don’t even post them.

That got me started down a road of self-teaching. Taking photos of objects, crafts, food, and experiences is much different than taking photos of people. I wanted to learn how to take better photos so I started researching how I could do that. Over the last few months I’ve gotten a lot better at taking photos for my blog but I am far from great and still have much to learn. I figured it would be cool if we could learn together.

Every Wednesday starting today, I will be posting a photo behind the photo. I’ll also let you know the tips I learned and applied to that particular photo shoot. Here is an example.

This is the photo from my recent blog post here: Holiday Entertaining, Dessert with Friends. It was one of those days for me. I had made the cake, done all of the prebaked shots with ingredients and such and then I went and forgot to take photos of the finished product. Did I mention that it was late in the evening by this time?

All I could do is set up my mini studio. You can see from this photo how I rig lighting when there is no natural light. Lighting is the most important element. I got these clip on lamps from Target for $6. You must use bulbs that are white, halogen 100 watt. Light the object you are shooting from as many sides as possible. If you can’t light from all sides use a white poster board on the unlit side to reflect the light. That is what I did in this photo. The white poster board is on the left side. Take many photos from all different angles and heights. You never know what will look good until you get it on the computer to look at them.

In my attempt to get really great photos I got on top of our counter to take photos from that angle. While I was taking pictures I caught more “behind the photo” action taking place. Matthias had walked in and didn’t see me. I knew he was going for the cake. The boys can sniff out sugar a mile a way. How do kids do that anyway?

I snuck down off of the counter and walked around behind him and started snapping away. He hesitated for a while. It was all I could do not to laugh. Then he finally went for it. You can watch the story unfold in my collage here…

He got himself a bite. And looked at me like he couldn’t believe I snuck up on him. Good grief, huh?

That’s it. That’s how this little adventure will work. Write a post showing us a photo you took and posted on your blog. Then let us know how you took that photo: what techniques, tricks, angles, advice did you use to achieve it?

If you want to join along with me I have a link up ready for you to to link to. This should be lots of fun! We will do this every Wednesday so mark your calendars and be sure to follow the feed so you can share and learn along with us!