Unusual baking flour

I like these bowls from Sur La Tab and I think they will work well as containers for some various flours I have at home.

I do a series of composition tests. My favorite is actually the middle image with the brown bowls but the flour will stand out better in the gray bowls and background so that's what I go with. I try to remember that they are called props because they are supposed to prop up the main idea and not become the focus themselves.

After a little tweaking this is the final pic.

Frozen Shrimp Packaging

I just shot several frozen shrimp packaging shots for a company in San Diego. I picked up all the plates and bowls myself, which seemed like a simple enough task except that the images were going to be the same size on the packaging and you had to be able to tell the different size shrimp from the images. That meant I had to have exactly the perfect size plate or bowl for each image, so that the right amount of shrimp were used, and of course I wanted to have lots of choices for each shot so what seemed simple enough at first ended up taking a lot of time. My bad. Next time I hire a prop stylist like on most shoots!

This was my first time working with a food stylist in Southern California and she did a great job, Cindy Epstein.

Each image is going to end up against a dark color so I put them against this purple/blue just to get the retouching and exposure adjustments right before sending them the finals.