Month: September 2009

Meat Photography

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Had an unusual job a couple of weeks back, I was asked to photograph various meat cuts from a side of lamb. I have done a lot of product photography including food that has been cooked but not uncooked meat. First of all everything was kept cool with an esky and frozen cool packs, this kept the meat looking nice and fresh. I then had to make sure that the surface of the meat was clean as a lot of the cuts were cut with a meat saw and there were fragments of bone all over the surface of the various cuts. The best solution was a tooth brush, I just brushed the surface and the bone fragments were gone. The other problem was blood on the surface of various cuts, this was soaked up with paper towel. Once the cuts were cleaned up the problem was how to light them. I found out that meat is somewhat translucent so out with my opal acrylic so I could light the meat from below, I metered the light and after adding a couple of sheets of white poly to further diffuse the light I had a nice white background with a little light making it through the thinner cuts. I then added a couple of soft boxes and all was good. All in all I was very happy with the results and so was my client.

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large format printing

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I have had a number of customers ask me if such and such a photo is suitable to print at say 6 meters x 4 meters. Well it all comes down to viewing distance, large billboard prints are almost always viewed from a distance, so are often printed using only a 12 dpi image. We don’t print many large billboards but do print a lot of roll up banners. The banners are mainly 845mm x 2000mm and we often use cropped images. We normally like to print with a 100 dpi image as the banners are often viewed quite closely. The actual print resolution that we print at is 720 x 1440. It takes a lot of printed dots to make up a single coloured pixel. I have found that a 6 megapixel image from a digital SLR scales up very well and the print looks great even with your nose almost touching the surface of the banner. We normally use  PhotoZoom Professional for resizing our photographs. Adobe Photoshop also does a great job if you do it in say 5 to 10% increments. Most of our stockphotos are now taken with either a Canon 50D or 5D Mk II so we can even crop tighter if necessary. I have found that many point and shoot images do not scale up very well, SLR’s with their larger sensors do give a considerably cleaner image that is more suitable for up scaling. The conclusion is that most images from modern SLR’s can be scaled up for almost any use depending on viewing distance. Once having said all that a 20 megapixel image scaled up to billboard size will look somewhat cleaner than a 6 megapixel image.

Example of roll up banner stands using stock photographs
Example of roll up banner stands using stock photographs