Sandwich 00447

Since I'm waiting for the nature photography season to start again I thought I might try out something new - food photography. I watched a whole bunch of instructive videos, looked up loads of example photos and finally tried it out.
Making the sandwiches was the easiest part but I had fun trying to find the best set-up, too. Of course, there's a lot of room to improve so any suggestions would be very welcome! For example I should have worked more with the background here. I wanted to add some of the ingredients of the "meal" there but simply chucking some lettuce leaves and egg shells in there? Nah, that could have come out better with a different arrangement. The upper left corner seems to be rather empty if you compare it to the rest of the picture but I didn't really know what to put there. Maybe a pepper mill? Or some growing cress?

But what did I do? First I made a sketch of how I wanted the final photo to look like so I had something to start with. I tried arranging the plate and glass before actually making the food to see if what I'd imagined was even possible. Then I made the sandwiches, grabbed a glass of apple juice and some of the leftovers and arranged it all in a way I thought looked appetizing. Luckily my flatmate had only bought cress and after making sure I wouldn't get lynched for stealing a bit I used that to make the plate look more interesting.
I also made a reflector out of a round plastic thingy and aluminium foil to get rid of some of the shadows. That actually worked like a charm - if I do say so myself.
By the way, I didn't use a tripod here. I set up everything on my desk and used a stack of folders so the camera was at an angle.
Another thing I wanted to make sure was to eat whatever I wanted to photograph and not unnecessarily increase the amount of good food thrown away. So after the session I had a lovely lunch

I did quite a bit of post-processing as well. Apart from the usual cropping and changing brightness and contrast I decided to change the perspective of the background so that it's parallel to the frame.

Technical data: Aperture f/10 - Shutter speed 1/2s - ISO speed 100 - Focal length 33mm