Cinnamon Bun Shoot.
For this shoot, I baked cinnamon buns and placed them in a circular tin, in a concentric way, and I left them in the tin before beginning my shoot. I left an oven glove in the background and shot it on a plain grey background. I did this shoot under a tungsten light, inside - to give warmer lighting. I used my flash with a fast shutter speed and a moderate (medium) aperture for most of the shoot but adjusted it for some of my shots dependent on what I wanted to achieve out of the image. I found that, due to shooting inside, without at flash my images had a shadow due to there being no evenly diffused light - the flash helped to eliminate this. I used a ‘Fujifilm Instax SQUARE SQ1’ for the Polaroid-style base image. I took the photos using a Canon EOS 4000d DSLR camera, changing the settings dependent on the angle.
Original Image.
I shot this image overhead which was an inspired composition from my research on David Loftus’ food (commercial) photography style which makes food look more appealing. I arranged the food in this circular, rustic way (the pan and overn glove gaining a small feature) because it reflects the warmth and comfort of the cinnamon buns - an autuminal, warm comfort food. I also did this because i planned for my further developments, which was to ‘Photoshop’ this image into another, inside of a polaroid. Shooting the cinnamon buns this way, i could crop into the centre of the pan, filling the entire sqaure Polaroid frame with the cinnamon buns which achieve the warm atmosphere I wanted to achieve. Similarly, not only due to the later developments, this style of photography could also link to inspiration from Maxim Zavialov's Instagram-style work, these images using the Instagram-style of food photography, which involves filling the small square [Instagram] frame with all different food elements – maximising the small space provided – resulting in a rustic, appealing overall photograph which may be used for product marketing (on social media).
Developments.
For the developments of this image, i first opened Adobe Photoshop and used the lasso and eraser tools to remove the inner frame of the image. I then added my other image, of the cinnamon rolls, and put this image layer underneath my original layer - revealing through the frame, combining both images together. I then scaled the cinnamon bun layer until it joined up with the background and the lines roughly matched up. However, the lighting was still off and looked unnatural to an extent so I exported and opened it into Adobe Lightroom , i adjusted the lighting, colour and textures. Overall, i created a warmer image and added grain, similar to my developments of my Maxim Zavialov work.
Final Image.
With this image, i was extremely pleased with the way the editing turned out. By shooting the initial overhead shot, inside, it gave a natural shadow to the photo which almost created a vignette - which focused the natural eye onto the Polaroid image more. This shadow also created a lighting difference between the polaroid image and the background, the background being darker, which emphasised the shallow depth of field and allowed for more texture and detail to appeaar on the food. My aim, for this photograph, was to achieve a warm atmosphere, to complement the comfort food displayed - juxtaposing the risotto shoot i did which approached a more glamourous, clean style of commercial photography. For my final adjustments, i edited it very similarly to my other Maxim Zavialov- tyle photos, which i have experimented with previously, by addeing the grain and square crop to the photo - to achieve this final Instagram-style look - combining both photographic styles of Maxim Zavialov and David Loftus.