Godox Flash For Perfect Food Photography Pour Shots

Hey, what's up everyone? How's it going? In today's video, I'm going to show you how to get some of my favorite shots that are messy, they're gooey, they're sweet, they look oh so delicious. Everyone loves them. I'm going to show you how to get that perfect action shot every single time. So basically, we're talking about action shots here, capturing that perfect drizzle of something yummy onto something else that's equally yummy. Think syrups on pancakes or sauces or salad dressings or maybe it's even your favorite booze pouring onto that first little ice cube. I mean, there's a ton of different foodie type action shots, the dusting of powdered sugar, throwing some flour, sprinkling spices, whatever you can come up with. But I literally cannot tell you how many times I've ruined the shot, ruined the food and everything else trying to capture that perfect pour or action. And then there's this light bulb moment. And I think that's really the path of growing as a food photographer, is really finding those simple solutions to those time-consuming problems. And that's kind of what this tutorial is all about. And if you haven't figured out how to get that perfect action shot yet, don't worry because once you see it, it'll kind of be like a real facepalm moment. Like, why didn't I think of that sooner? I mean, at least that's how I felt about it. But before we get started today, I need to give a huge shout out to Godux for sending over their TT685 Speedlite for Canon. Yeah, that's the light we're going to be using for today. They also sent over their X-Pro wireless transmitter to fire off this flash. And I'm super excited about this because a lot of you have asked me if I can give a demonstration for flash and food photography. So I'm going to show you how to use it, the settings that I'm going to be using, how I'm going to modify it and all that great stuff to capture the image in the studio here today. But in a later video, because they are so portable and they're great for food photographers who shoot at restaurants and stuff like that, I'm going to show you how to get some great light out of these on location. Who makes a wire this short? Seriously? But I can't tell you how many times I've completely destroyed my waffles trying to get this perfect action or poor shot. But now that I have these kind of shots figured out, I approach them much more strategically. Okay, so the very first thing that I want to do is find a backdrop or create an environment or a scene that will contrast nicely with the action that's going to happen in the photo. For example, if I was going to do a baking shot and throwing flour was going to be my action, then maybe something like this black backdrop would work really nicely for that. Or maybe even this blue one back here. But I think for my waffle shot, right up front is this beautiful green. And I think this is going to contrast nicely with that golden syrupy goodness that I got going on here. Now I'm going to place this background here and use this stack of waffles as a stand in. That way I can set my camera up on a tripod. Now a tripod is a necessity for this kind of shot. And you'll see why in just a second. But now that this small step is done and out of the way, it's time to get rocking on that brand new flash. Now to light this action poor shot today, I'm going to be using the Godox TT685 speedlight for Canon and combine it to fire it off from the camera, the X-Pro wireless transmitter. Now the Godox TT685, it's a pretty stellar little light and it'll basically do everything that you would expect from a speedlight for a much more budget friendly price. And when combined with the X-Pro wireless transmitter, you can do some pretty cool stuff like ETTL where your flash will read your camera's exposure and automatically adjust the power of the light. Which is great for when you're doing something like an outdoor food shoot. But today I'm going to forego all this awesome tech and just shoot in the flash's manual mode with a bunch of different modifiers. Now to modify my speedlight, I'm going to be using dish reflectors, grids, and soft boxes. And to attach them to the flash, I'm going to use this cheap flash to Bowens mount modifier ring. This one's made by Godox as well. Basically you attach it to the light stand, you pop in the flash, clamp it down, and then you can attach any kind of modifier that you would like to the front of the ring. As always, the links for all of this gear will be in the description below. Great portable solutions for food photographers. But let's set it all up and get rocking on this action shot. All right, so I got my little Godox TT685 speedlight here and I'll just clamp this down into the Bowens modifier ring. Like I said, this thing is really super cool because it allows me to use such a wide variety of modifiers for my speedlight like soft boxes, snoots, or even this grid dish reflector combo set. This is a 60 degree grid. It's from Godox as well and I'll just clip that in and I'm ready to shoot. Now as far as the settings for the speedlight here, I'm going to be setting the flash to manual mode and I'll be using a 100 millimeter lens. So I'll set this to, well, it looks like 105 is the closest. And then cranking the power all the way up to one-to-one or full power. This is kind of my go-to light and modifier setup that I like to use to get that natural light look to my food photography with the large diffuser pressed right up against the table and the dish reflector grid combo set attached to the light. But because the speedlight is less powerful than my studio strobes and because each one of these modifiers is cutting down the power of the light, I've moved the light in closer than I normally would. It's about three feet and a couple of inches, so about half the distance that I normally would use with my studio strobes. And I've also cranked the power of the light to full power and I think those two things will give me the amount of light that I want or that I need to use the apertures that I want to create this image. Okay, so I've ditched this white plate. It was getting a little bit bright and I've exchanged it for this nice green one. I think it works better with the background. And as far as the styling goes, I want to keep it pretty simple. Maybe just a couple of props like this container of almonds and maybe this powdered sugar duster I'll just place off to the side there. And I also want to make sure that I leave enough room up top in my composition. That way I don't crop off my pour. I still got my stand-in waffles there. I'll switch those out for some fresher ones when we get ready for the final image. But I'll just take a little test shot here for an action shot like this. I think I want to get as much in focus as possible, so I'll be using an aperture of f11 and ISO 100. f8 to f11 is a normal aperture for me when I'm shooting from above the table. But when my camera is down here, I'm usually at an aperture of f4 to get that nice blurry background. However, with the speed light at full power, that would just be way too much light. So to turn the power of the light down, I can actually control that here on the X-Pro transmitter. I can control it in third stops and I can cut it down three stops to 1 eighth power. Then switch my camera from f11 to f4 and take another shot. And that's super easy to be able to switch it there right on the X-Pro without having to touch the light. This is so super handy if you have your light placed in a hard to reach area. But you could also have multiple lights on here. You could have them on different channels and all that stuff. Really super cool. Now I know this is my particular lighting setup when using studio strobes and speed lights, but I know a lot of you use soft boxes to light your food photography. So I wanted to give that a test and see how that looks with this Godox TT685. I would push this soft box right up against the table here. This is a rather large soft box, so it should be pretty interesting to see the results. And this soft box speed light combo looks pretty good. It seems to be cutting down the power of the light just as much as the diffuser and the grid dish reflector combo. So I move the light back up to full power or 1 to 1 and I change my aperture back up to f11. Although it's a little less contrasting, a little softer in the shadow areas and highlights. It's not that bad. All right, now that this step of setting up the lights is finished, it's time to get back to creating this perfect pour shot and styling our final stack of heart attacks here. I'm sure you all know that the main problem with trying to capture action on camera is that by the time you do get that perfect pour or action, unless you nail it the first time, within seconds the food is just a complete mess. You either have too much syrup or too much sauce or your glass is overflowing. So what we're going to be doing here is breaking this down into two shots. The first image is the perfect shot of just the food. You can even add a little bit of syrup like I did here just to further along the story. But this is your main shot of your dish without the pour. So make sure that this shot is perfect and you're really completely happy with it because once you start the action you won't see it like this again. Now I've picked a blueberry on the top of the waffle stack here to focus my camera on for this second image and I'm going to be using that blueberry as kind of a target for when I pour my syrup. That way hopefully most of my images have the syrup container and the pour in the correct spot for the composition. As I photograph these I'm just going to be rattling them off using this remote shutter and hopefully capture a couple of good ones. That way when we get back to the computer it'll be super easy to combine the perfect shot of the food and the perfect pour. There's so much syrup on this waffle right now. It's like waffle soup. All right so I've cleaned up all that sticky gooey syrupy mess back there and I've taken the two images and placed them inside of Photoshop. And in a couple of quick steps we'll have this perfect pour shot done and But before I do that I need to make a quick announcement. I've started a Patreon account. I know I'm super late to the game and everything but the reason being is that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to do this and how to do it right. I didn't want to just ask for donations on the side. I know it's kind of cliche but I wanted to create a space where you guys get a deeper dive into my entire food photography process from the business side of things to marketing to portfolio building which I think is really important. And we'll do some critiques and we'll have discussion on there. So there's going to be a ton of cool members only content coming soon. But right now if you sign up you'll get a 40% discount off on all of my food photography courses. So check that out. The link will be in the description below. But enough about that. Let's get started on creating this perfect pour shot. All right I've already done a little color correction in Adobe Camera Raw and I've loaded both of the images here into Photoshop. I have my shot of just the food with that perfect syrup drip coming down the left hand side there. And then I have the shot of the pour which I actually have a ton of shots where the pour was facing away from the light. I don't know what I was thinking. So I'm really happy I was able to get this one. Now first off I just want to place both of these images onto the same document. So I'll use the move tool V on the keyboard and while holding shift I'll drag one on top of the other. From here it's just a few more simple steps. Now you can see I have two layers. The perfect shot of the food and that pour shot behind it. So I want to mask in the pour up here in this empty space. I'll create a simple mask on this top layer. I'll go down to the bottom of the toolbar here and click on this mask icon. And then you can see it just pops up on the top layer there. Now I'll grab my brush tool. It's B on the keyboard and I'll want to make sure that the hardness of this brush is turned all the way down. Now I'll increase the size a bit with just the goal of bringing in that hand and syrup in only a couple of swipes. It's really that simple but this little easy technique in my opinion is really the foundation for so many more advanced shots. I'll zoom way in here on that pour and I'll make my brush a bit smaller here and just bring this pour in and I'll work my way all the way down just skirting around these berries and almond slices. Now if you mask out something that you didn't want to just press X on the keyboard that that switches you to the opposite color and you can bring that back in. Now on your image you can mask in whatever you want to from the other photo. I like to jump back and forth to see what I want to bring in and what I don't. Like these two drips up front here. I kind of like those so I think I'll bring this one in down in the front on the right hand side here and also bring in this one over here in the middle as well. That kind of gives some character to the front of my waffle stack and that's it. Super simple right? It can be as simple or as complicated as you want. I mean this shot right here is a real simple one but I mean you could plan for as many drips or as many actions as you want. You just take more images and then bring them in just the same way I did here. But no matter how complicated you want to make it. Two images, four, six, twelve images. It's really the same technique that I just showed you right here. With a good plan and a good strategy you can really have perfect pour or action shots every single time. But hey go check out the Patreon membership site. I'm really excited about that. New members get 40% off on all of my courses plus there's going to be a load of new members only content there that I'm just really excited to share with you. So go check it out. The link will be in the description below and if you want to find out more about the Godex TT685 flash and their X-Pro wireless transmitter plus all the really cool modifiers for speedlights. Go check out the links in the description below. Some really cool gear for photography. But if you like this video as always please give it a subscribe, a thumbs up, turn on notifications, drop a comment down below and oh if you make one of these photos, one of these action shots, tag me in it. I'd love to see it. But as always I'll see you in the next one.