A month of muffins

This page is about taking pictures of food, and in this case, muffins. These muffins were made by my daughter for a school project that she named “A month of muffins”. She decided to bake one dozen muffins a day for each day of the month, for a total of 360 muffins. A book is now available, in french, through the Blurb company Un mois de muffins

Every week, she baked a few dozen. As soon as the muffins were out of the oven, she booked some time for the photo session. We worked together on the different shots and as soon as the pictures were taken, she immediately put the muffins in freezing bags for a weekly delivery to “La Maison Gilles Kègle” in Quebec City, who offers much needed help to people in need.

She then made a book with recipes, taking care to calculate the carbohydrates and fat content for people with Type 1 and 2 diabetes. For every recipe, she included a picture. The recipes are not included here, but the website page shows the results of her work as a baker and assistant photographer.

Showing dozens of different muffins required some attention to details and presentation. If the same method of shooting had been used for each recipe, the pages of her book would rapidly have become repetitive.

So here were the aspects that were considered:

1. If there was going to be dozens of pages of photos on the same subject for the recipe book, the number of muffins presented in a single picture would have to be different: a single one, a few, the full dozen or dozens at a time for a special effect.

2. The pictures would be taken from different positions: from the side, at an angle, from the top, zoomed in or farther away.

3. When there were few muffins presented on one picture, we tried different ways of showing them: either stacking them or placing them one in front of each other.

4. We tried to show the best specimens.

5. Most of the time, we worked with a macro 100mm, although a 50mm f/1.4 was used twice.

6. The flash was used once, and with reduced power.

7. Some pictures were taken with a polarizing filter when the muffins were too shiny for our taste.

8. All the pictures were taken with a tripod and with the camera set to aperture-priority mode.

9. It is common knowledge in food photography that best results are obtained under daylight. But since the shooting was to be done mostly in the evening, we bought a lightbox to provide some natural light effect.

10. White card boards were used as diffusers, when the lightbox was not practical.

11. Different aperture settings were experimented for every picture, according to the total sharpness desired. Generally speaking, pictures were taken with apertures between 2.8 and 6.3.

12. We used different colored plates, for variety. All the muffins on the same white surface would quickly have become repetitive and boring. But we took care that the colors would not be too striking, to the point of erasing the main subject of interest.

13. We used small plates as we did not want our little muffin to be lost in the center of a gigantic plate.

14. We bought some accessories, like the sunflower napkins, the turquoise cup, the wooden and plastic cutting boards as well as the tablecloths. They added to the variety of each picture.

15. Although we had some colored backgrounds here and there, we tried to keep them blurred so that they would not get too much attention.

16. The idea to add flowers in some of the shots proved to be interesting, adding a touch of life.

17. For each picture, a decision was made as to the pertinence of disposing additional elements like cutlery, a bit of butter, the crumbs of a broken muffin, etc. When an accessory was considered, we discussed its optimal position on the plate.

18. As a general rule, an obstacle was placed in the upper right section of the photo so that the viewer’s eye would return to the main subject once having reached the right side of the frame.

19. Since Christmas was approaching, we decided to try a shot of our muffins on a three-tiered plate with a blurred Christmas tree in the background. Why not profit from a special context?

20. Talking of context, a Christmas theme paper was chosen for some of the muffins.

21. For every recipe, depending on the color of the muffin, a different wrapper was chosen by my daughter. It was sometimes a colorful one, to add a bit of life to a pale muffin, or a dull wrapper when the muffin was already colored enough.

22. We could have unwrapped most of the muffins for the photo session, looking for other effects. But since we wanted to give them all to La Maison Gilles Kègle, we wanted them to be untouched.

23. There were two exceptions when we cut a muffin in two pieces and placed it in front of a whole one, just to make it more inviting to the viewer.

24. The main ingredients that were part of the recipe were placed around the plate or on the tablecloth when possible. This gave a quick indication to the viewer as to the kind of muffin.

25. Planning the photo sessions was important. As we were not producing pictures for a magazine, we could not take a whole day to shoot one or two muffins. We knew already that we would have to compromise on some ideas.

26. Photoshop was used to crop each picture and make the final adjustments.

27. The pictures were taken in RAW+JPEG for better results.

At the beginning of this page, it was said that the muffins went to La Maison Gilles Kègle. For those of you who are bilingual, here is a video on Gilles Kègle and his work. He’s been working double shifts with no days off for the last few decades to help people in need. The video also shows him when he met Mother Theresa years ago. Fondation Gilles Kègle

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