Almonds, Honey and Cinnamon

I took these photos a few days ago and have only just had time to write up a post! I’ve been working… a lot… 14 hours yesterday and up at 5:50am this morning to go to work. I wanted to do an individual ingredient shoot/feature, and chose three favorites of mine:

Almonds, Raw Honey and Cinnamon

They all have wonderful health benefits and taste sooo good. Almonds are a good protein and rich in healthy fats. Raw honey is a wonderful natural sweetener and has anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties keeping you healthy and not sick in these winter months! Cinnamon also has anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties as well as anti-inflammatory properties. And it’s plain tasty in a bowl of oatmeal.

I wanted to keep this shoot clean and simple, focusing on the ingredients and not the props. I set up a white, light-friendly set up and used white linens and wood for backdrops.

We had a nice sunny day so I used the light from my bedroom window without a diffuser, and bounced it off my white foam board and foil reflector.

I started off with the almonds…

A little over excited, I started snapping without fixing the background or moving the orange clamp that holds up the foam board. You can see it in the left top corner.

I added a fresh blue napkin to this one for a little color.

I took the same approach with the cinnamon, putting it into a cute little spice jar and tying it with raffia for a little accent. Don’t be afraid to repackage, rebottle, unpackage, switch containers/label/etc… This cinnamon comes in a large plastic bulk container that is not very photogenic.

I like to pull the ingredients out of the jars or packaging to photograph them. It’s so much more visually interesting. I like the cracking of the cinnamon here, and the contrast agains the white and silver of the teaspoon.

The honey I shot a day after the cinnamon and almonds because of a time constraint. Thankfully we had another sunny day (you have to worry about things like sunshine in Michigan… :( ) and I had the same natural light to work with.

Once I loaded these shots into the computer I saw that my white balance was pretty messed up… The automatic settings on PSE switched some stuff around and it was driving me crazy. I had been shooting on Custom White Balance, set from the day before, and it looked great on the camera but there were some preloaded settings or something that messed it up… Still not sure about that one =/. They still aren’t perfectly balanced…

I used a white linen with a lace accent on my distressed beaded board for a homey, clean, kitchen-y look.

I started off with this little wooden spoon that my grandpa made, but it wasn’t working with the shoot so I switched to a metal teaspoon.

You can’t see it here, but this spoon has a neat little floral pattern. Which reminds me, I still need to go silverware shopping! I want to find some antique silverware to shoot with…

Next post: All three ingredients together!

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