Capturing Eggs & Bacon in Motion
Steve Hansen
Lesson Info
14. Capturing Eggs & Bacon in Motion
Summary (Generated from Transcript)
The lesson is about capturing food in motion, specifically eggs and bacon, and the instructor provides tips and techniques for achieving the desired shots.
Q&A:
What is the instructor's approach to capturing an egg in motion?
The instructor advises using a spatula to support the egg and guides the camera operator to capture the egg as it slides off the spatula.
What tricks can be used to create the illusion of food falling?
The instructor mentions using rigs to make it look like food is falling when it is actually being hit from underneath.
How does the instructor suggest capturing bacon in motion?
The instructor shapes wire to create a bacon-like form and uses it to suspend the bacon. The camera operator is then guided to capture the bacon as it is dropped.
What should be done to avoid overlapping ingredients during the capturing process?
The instructor recommends selecting the "hero" shots (the best ones) and flipping through them to ensure there is no overlapping or need for further adjustments in Photoshop.
How does the instructor suggest adjusting the positioning of ingredients in post-processing?
The instructor advises using the magic wand tool in Photoshop to select and move the ingredients, and mentions that bacon can be easily adjusted due to the contrast between the edges and the background.
What is the instructor's approach to capturing butter in motion?
The instructor attaches the butter to armature wire and positions it for the shot, taking into consideration the texture and angle of the lighting to achieve desired results.
Lessons
Introduction To Class
19:26 2Splash Photography Gear
12:08 3Rigging & Special Effects Gear
19:10 4What is Commercial Photography?
14:18 5Building a Splash Photography Set
09:59 6Setting Up Your Splash Image
11:33 7Capturing Your Splash Image
36:07 8More Splash Photo Techniques
12:33How to Capture Splash Images on a Budget
12:43 10What is Crash Photography?
07:55 11Building a Crash Photography Set
08:24 12Crash Photo Food Prep
13:40 13Capturing Flying Pancakes
17:42 14Capturing Eggs & Bacon in Motion
12:39 15Capturing High Speed Plate Crashes
10:30 16Capturing Syrup Drips
04:36 17Studio Workflow for Splashes & Crashes
11:04 18Choosing The Right Splash Images
13:57 19Combining Splash Layers in Photoshop
26:48 20Splash Image Final Touches
06:27 21Combining Crash Images in Photoshop
28:16Lesson Info
Capturing Eggs & Bacon in Motion
Let's do bacon, we'll get the bacon heated up and then we'll do, let's do the egg now, and then we'll get the bacon blow-torched. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, where's my spatula? I'll use that one, thank you very much. Mm-hmm. So with an egg, I don't mess around. We're gonna just have to clone this out. I want the full support of the spatula. This is a great spatula 'cause it drains, but also has plenty of room to hang out, for the egg to hang out on. So I'm going to have this light off. We only have two heroes, so we don't get a second opportunity really with this. So I'm gonna drop it, but I'm gonna have you take, it's gonna be at the very top, right? Yeah. If we have to cut this out that's not a problem, because we can just move it down, so right when it leaves this, capture it. Okay. And so we're gonna wanna position it on, this one was positioned pretty much right above the midline of the frame, so we'll wanna be a little bit above that and I can g...
uide you into that. And then over that board. Okay, so guide, when I put it on here, guide, and we want a clean one, but we want it to be, we want to cover it with oil so that it doesn't stick so it actually will slide off so clean, we got a little bit of oil on this. And then we're ready to go. All right. Nice looking egg. So you're gonna guide me as far as the elevation. And then once you have the elevation, I'm just gonna let it slide off and you just capture it right when it leaves the um. Okay. And so go a little higher than you think so it has room to go, okay? All right. So you're too high. A little bit further down. Now move, camera right. A little bit further camera right. Yeah, that should work. All right, so you're gonna see it slide off and I just need you to grab it, okay? Yep. Do it. We're gonna see it slide off, right? Huh? So am I still good? Yeah, you're still a little high now. Here we go, go, um, go. And we lost that one, but we have it, don't we? That's pretty good. Yep, I like it. It's going to be vertical. With this one, I'm actually gonna hold it and I'm gonna toss it. When you see things falling, they're not always necessarily falling. They could be coming up. I mean, there's tricks where you can break things and make it look like they're dropping on the ground by actually hitting it from underneath, with like a, there's a rig that we use that actually breaks stuff from the ground up, so I'm gonna toss this next one. This isn't as much of a hero, but I'm gonna have the hero side facing the camera so it'll look heroic, and I'm just gonna toss it up in the air, and we'll see what happens. I'm gonna cover my hand in oil so it'll leave. Not hot oil. I almost put my hand in the hot oil. (laughing) (groaning) See, that's why I had to leave the food business. Your (mumbling). Thank you very much. Yeah. Alright, so Jack, what I want to ask you is how this looks to you on camera. So come camera right and since we're tossing it, come further down. Um, higher than that, though. Okay, that should work. Actually, I'm gonna let it, I feel like there's too much suction. I can already feel it on my hands. I'm gonna drop this too. Okay. I feel like we have with an egg, it's so delicate, I don't wanna -- Yeah, so then come up pretty significantly. Up a little bit further. Actually, I'm gonna drop it but I'm gonna drop it from both, I'm gonna break the yolk, I know it. Okay, here we go. I'm gonna drop it 'cause I want to get it more horizontal. Yeah, that's a pretty good position. Okay, I'm gonna go one, two, three, and then pull both hands away so it just drops. Okay. Okay? Yep. And when I say one, two, three, go, go is when I pull away. One, two, three, go. That was low. Well we can cut it out. The egg, I'm willing to cut out. Well, it was pretty low. That looks terrible. (laughing) You know what, that can be a second egg. Why don't we add an egg to this? That looks kinda cool. Yeah. I like it. We can add that as a second egg. That cannot be the hero, but. Wasn't as low as I thought it was. I thought it had hit the ground. Okay, so bacon? Let's do bacon. Thank you for getting us ready, Molina. You're welcome. And bacon, I'm gonna create the, I'm gonna use the wire again, so we have it. And I'm just gonna shape it to, I'm gonna go like this and I'm gonna go like this. Shape of bacon. And usually what I do at the end is when I get something rigged up, I'll just kinda tie it off. It gives it more strength and it makes sure it doesn't come lose. So you can actually, like that. That gives it way more strength. So that when you come under it, it won't bust out or bend. Alright, here we go. That's probably too long for this but we can still cut it out. It's better than not doing it. Alright, guide me. Yeah, so do we have just one slice of bacon? So Steve, if you can take a look at your drawing. There's two. One of them looks like syrup probably. Right, so this one here and that one there? That one, there. Okay. Those are the two, yeah. Cool. We may, let me see what I can get as far as positioning those. So I had this armature wire go up into the bacon a little bit just to secure it. It's kind of a funky, in fact I'm gonna do the, I'm gonna tuck it into the other side, too. (beeping) Is somebody backing up? I hear, oh, okay. So I got it rigged for camera. Are we ready to go on set? So, yeah, it's gonna be right here. Okay. I'll get on set and then we'll guide it. And let me, you know, it's okay if you see some of the wire. We can get rid of that, but the less, the better. See, I'm just gonna drop this. This is too awkward. Okay, so yeah, you're positioned well. Just drop? Yeah. One, two, three, go. (camera shutter clicking) I think it flattened out when we, is it flat? Um, let me see. So let's do it again moved a little further in 'cause that, it did flatten out, but it also came and it's clipping off the edge of the frame a little bit. I like that, though. It looks, it's a good, Yeah. good spot, but. Okay. Let's do it again so we have it. I want to go through, the thing is if you do this over and over again, you just have to go through all these files. It's a lot of files. Um, so you want to get it right the best you can. So am I tilted the right way? Yes. 'Kay. One, two, three, go. (camera shutter clicking) That's better. I think that's tilted. Yeah, it's a little high, but we can probably lower it reasonably. I'm flexible on that. So. Let's do, let's do the second one. I'll use a different piece. This one looks really nice. I like the way it's wavy. We baked it on ropes of crumpled up foil so if we do rope and rope and rope of crumpled up foil and then lay the bacon over it and bake it, it creates these um, it cooks like that. Looks really cool. Any time you can add curves or gesture or anything cool, you always want to do it if it calls for it. So where's the second piece go? So the second piece of bacon is gonna go sort of right above the top left pancake, so you started basically the same, just opposite, and moved over so it's gonna go kinda like this, yeah. But on camera left? On camera left, yeah. Okay. Does that sound good? Yeah, so lift up just little bit further. 'Kay. One, two, three, go. (camera shutter clicking) Let's do that one more time. Let's do it thrice. No, just once. One more time. 'Cause that one works, it's just a little low. So hand up in a little further. Okay. Alright, one, two, three, go. (camera shutter clicking) That might be a little flat, no it's about -- Yeah. So what you can do is if you're at home, you kind of select your heroes and then you'll go through and you'll flip through them all and make sure that none are overlapping. It's okay if things intersect. That's actually a good thing. You don't want everything separate. But you want to make sure there's not bacon right where you shot the pancake. Or bacon, you know what I mean? So you want to flip through real fast. Select all your heroes that you know you're gonna want to use and make sure you don't need to do another frame of any ingredient because you missed the spot. You can go into Photoshop and you can create, I mean, when we do layouts, we'll position it exactly and we won't have to, we will do it, but we won't run into this. When I'm testing and I'm a lot looser and you're at home, I run into this all the time where liquids and a lot of things end up in the same quadrant so you end up having to cut them out. That's a huge nightmare. And I want you to avoid having to do that 'cause it takes a lot of Photoshop skill and a lot of time out of your day. So it's better to just do it right. So Steve, right now if we look at this, the left hand bacon should be higher than the right and right now the right hand is pretty similar on height to the left. Yeah, but we can -- We can move that down. Magic, that's easy. Yeah. Because our background is very vertical and evenly lit, so we're gonna have an easy time with this in Photoshop. I will show you kind of how to overcome some issues but we can move up and down all we want, really. There isn't any lighting, you can tell when something's not gonna fit somewhere else. If we go too far down, if it gets darker near the surface. It just needs to come down to like here. But bacon's one of those things where you can just take the magic wand tool. You don't even have to use, I mean, it does a really good job, especially with a lighter background. There's a lot of contrast between the edge. It'll understand what you have there. And if it doesn't get it right, you can always blend it back in. It's a pretty quick process. So I'm okay with that, let's do it. 'Cause I want to show them how to do that. I don't want to get it totally perfect. And that's easy for me to do, is not get it. Okay, so we gotta do crashes and let's do crashes. So we got the butter. Yeah, let's do butter. Yeah. And butter is easy to attach to armature wire so that's a cakewalk. Um, but then you have to find what you did with (laughing). Oh, there we go, we got it. Thank you. Um-hmm. These are beautiful. Alright. So I did this, now I gotta clip it off. And this stuff cuts really easy. Also another quick food styling tip, Joyce Chen scissors, write that down. Those are your friend. They're really heavy duty and they're needle point and they're accurate and they're tough and they can cut through tree trunks. Alright. I like this one. Alright, Jack. Tell me where. Little bit further down, but not much. That's too much. Um, now camera right a little bit. (camera shutter clicking) So that should be pretty close. Yeah, maybe lift it up just a little bit. And (camera shutter clicking) yeah, one of those two is gonna be in the right spot. Alright, now do we have it tilted in a way that it shows texture on the surface, or is it blown out? 'Cause I'm okay changing the angle. I've got some texture on the surface, here. Okay. That's the thing about food is I love texture so I'll actually angle stuff so it takes advantage of the angle of the light. We have giant softboxes here so it's gonna be a lot of light. But I do want to maintain some texture. I don't want the surface of that butter to blow out. I like the side to do that. Not fully blow up but be the brighter version of it.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Cynthia
This course is so fun to watch! I love how hands-on this course is even while watching it 3000 miles away on the other side of the country. I love how Steve Hansen is like a mad scientist just throwing food everywhere just to capture the "right moment". It's great to watch a professional at work especially the behind-the-scenes that we normally won't ever know just by look at the final product. It's amazing how much work goes into this and actually gets me excited to try my hands on capturing food in motion as well - first need to find a place that allows me to get it messy :D I do prefer this type of course set up than the lecture-style some of the other courses are.
Christy cwood56
This course will NOT disappoint! So much quality info that can really help a photographer move to the next level. To see the actual shoots with food flying everywhere and how to capture all of it and turn it into an incredibly stunning image is worth every penny of the price tag. To spend an afternoon with Steve on a one to one basis would cost more than most of us could afford but that is exactly what this class offers! We see into the mind of an incredible artist and his creative process. This class has been invaluable to my personal education as a photographer. There is so much here and I will continually come back to it again and again to learn and refine my techniques and images. You opened up a world of possibilities to me with this class! Thanks Steve!!!
a Creativelive Student
I attended this class in person and I found it to be wonderful. Steve is awesome at what he does and he is great at explaining what he is doing and why he is doing it. This course will lay out all the steps needed to help you create awesome splash and crash photography. I highly recommend it.