The truth is that I obtained this domain name almost by accident. 

The wife and I had been discussing a project for quite some time to unify her two great loves of food and fashion.  In prepping for a Next Food Network Star Season 5 audition this past year, we finally happened upon a theme that melded her two passions: The Fashionable Foodie.  The title summed her up in a nutshell, encompassing her ridiculous lust for all things fashion related as well as her constant tinkering in the kitchen.  The Food Network audition went very well, but she did not receive a callback.

While my personal long term goal is to turn the concept into a weekly video podcast, it seemed like a shame to just let the idea languish until we bought a video camera.  I decided to just go ahead and jump in headfirst and create the concept for her as a website.  I thought that by creating content now and working to refine our style and content, we should have a backlog of good material to pull from when we’re finally able to jump into production.  Getting in a bit over my head as usual, I bought the domain name, started re-teaching myself wordpress and bought a year’s worth of webhosting at Bluehost.  The hosting plan came with a free domain registration, and thus ishotalot.com was born as a side project.

All things must dovetail in life and while prepping recipes for the site, I quickly discovered that photographing food is much more difficult then I’d thought.  Below is a shot of a delicious Vietnamese pork lettuce wrap.  Not terrible for a first attempt, but I could immediately see that I was going to have problems with backgrounds, proper camera support and lighting.

The camera support question is the easiest to answer.  I have a set of nice carbon fiber tripod legs attached to a clunky video-style head.  All I needed to do was find the missing tripod plate to begin using it again.  Eventually I’d need to upgrade to a geared or macro style head, but the tripod would be fine for the time being.

I started poking around on the web to see what most foodbloggers do to light their subjects and found that many of them are relying on natural lighting for their food photography.  I appreciate natural lighting, but in our case this is simply not going to be an option.  I don’t get home from work until around 5:00 PM each day and we usually don’t start cooking until six.  Generally, there won’t be enough natural lighting left when everything’s done cooking to get a suitable picture.  Furthermore, I’m somewhat experienced with lighting and I’ve used everything from open-faced redheads to big old PAR HMI’s.  I’m not the type of person to give up control and just shoot with whatever the skies give me.

In order to properly capture the food, I was going to need to use artificial lighting.  Since money is tight, I decided to keep costs as cheep as possible.  My research indicated that the preferred artificial light among many food bloggers is the Lowel Ego light, but I must admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Lowel’s lighting equipment.  The stands and supporting equipment are worthless junk and the lights themselves are rarely suitable for anything in production other then bounced fill. 

When I examined exactly what the Ego light is, I found myself wondering what Lowel’s exact markup is.  Two E27 sockets, a cord with in line switch and plug, a solid white back and diffuse front with two Compact Fluorescent Lamps for $137.50 retail?  Sure the quality of the light is very good and it seems to be quite easy for the average person to use, but I figured I could build something equivalent for half the cost at Home Depot. 

Rather then wrestle with questions of styling both our food and our backgrounds, I decided that I’d create my own miniature cyclorama and shoot everything on white until I get the hang of it.  In the long term, I’d prefer to shoot the food in more of an editorial style with some effort put into backgrounds and scenery, but for now everything will work just fine on a white shooting table.

Thus, my objective was set – to come up with a suitable lighting solution and create a cheap cyc using only items from Home Depot or the local craft store. 

In my next post, I’ll attempt to navigate the quagmire of CFL’s, CCT’s and CRI’s.