I was asked to do a 6 hours workshop in a place called Sztuka Fotografowania (The Art Of Making Pictures).
It’s an artistic initiative that invites every week the best photographers from the country to share the knowledge acquired with students. This invitation involved a trip to the one of the most beautiful places in Poland at the sea side, Gdańsk.
There was a plan for 2 hours of lecture about one of my advertising campaigns for Skoda, two hours of portrait photography and then in the end 2 hours of still life photography. During the planning days I found out that I can use whatever I like from Dicam studio - broncolor's distributor for Poland. At that moment I knew that I want to show my students how to freeze motion in food photography.
The decision was simple because it was easy to prepare and all the props and ingredients could easily be organized. I did some internet research and found reference pictures showing “flying” food. The idea was to make a fake campaign for a restaurant serving French crepes.
My only concern was if the crew from Gdańsk will collect all I need for the shoot. During next few days I went to Dicam studio to make some light tests to choose the best equipment for the job. In my daily work as a advertising photographer I always use broncolor and so this time I wanted to find light shapers which are rather rare and which I did not know well.
Of course I knew that for high speed pictures I will need Scoro power packs or Siros S monolights. After few hours of tests I totally felt in love with the Litepipe P light shaper. Additionally I chose the Para 88 for the portraits, four P70 reflectors with grids and a Striplite. Although Litepipe P was the main hero. As for the cameras I decided to use Canon EOS 5D MK IV with the new 85 mm lens as well as 100 mm macro.
Early in the morning, on the workshop day, I packed the car with my assistant and hit the road. We had 400 kilometers to do until 10 am in the morning when the workshop started. At the arrival, we immediately made sure, that everything was ready and in order for the workshop. Black background, the wooden table, box of eggs, few liters of milk, some pepper, flour, tomatoes, cucumbers, rosemary, yellow cheese, Parma ham, lettuce, few white plates, big knife, cutting board and few other small props. All was there, nice and set.
During the first hours I did the lecture and portraits of all the students using Para 88 with Scoro 3200 S set on a very soft setup with some board as a fill light. As a background light I used a Siros 800 with P70 reflector with narrow grid.
