Everybody loves cheap, but cheap comes with some specific costs.
Want a low-priced CFL bulb? No problem, but don’t expect color rendering to be very reliable. Want a cheap bulb housing? No problem, but be prepared to work with some crappy mounting options, limited flexibility and a 6′ cord.
Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot. In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.
Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping. Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible. We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely. I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake.
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.
