Chapter 14 — Exercises

Product and food photography rewards patience and a still subject, so most of these exercises are done at a table with a window — no studio, no travel, no new gear. A phone is an excellent tool here; the subject isn't going anywhere, so you have all the time you want. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything — your best frame may become this chapter's Portfolio keeper.

Before you start, gather the cheap kit this chapter runs on: a window, a sheet of white card or paper (your bounce), a sheet of black card or paper (your flag), and some diffusion (tracing paper, a thin white sheet, or baking parchment). That's the whole studio.

Part A — Seeing the surface (Read the Frame)

Exercise 14.1 ⭐ — Sort your kitchen by surface. Walk through your kitchen and sort ten objects into two piles: matte (mostly diffuse — they look the same brightness from any angle) and reflective (mostly specular — they have a moving mirror highlight). For each, write the one word — "reveal" (light to show texture/form) or "control" (manage the reflection) — that will drive how you'd light it. This is the read you do before every product shoot.

Exercise 14.2 ⭐⭐ — Find and move the highlight. Take any glossy object (a spoon, a mug, a phone) to a window. Find its specular highlight — the bright spot that is a tiny image of the window. Now move the object (not your eye) and watch the highlight travel. Write down: where does the object have to sit for the highlight to fall along its most flattering line? You're learning that the highlight's position is a dial you control.

Exercise 14.3 ⭐⭐ — Write a Described Photograph of a product shot. Find a product or food photograph you admire (a catalog, a cookbook, an ad). Write a full Described Photograph of it using the six fields (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON). Pay special attention to THE LIGHT: where was the source, was it hard or soft, and — if the object is shiny — what is the highlight a reflection of?

Exercise 14.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Reverse-engineer a reflection. Find a photo of a chrome or glass object (a watch, a perfume bottle, a wine glass). From the reflections alone, deduce the shape and position of the light source(s) and the cards around it. Sketch the setup from above (use the book's lighting-map symbols). You are reading the studio backward out of the surface — the highest-level product-lighting skill there is.

Part B — Lighting matte and reflective (Shoot This)

Exercise 14.5 ⭐ — Rake a matte object. Photograph one matte object with texture — a loaf of bread, a wool sweater, a stack of books, a halved tomato. Light it with soft window light from the side so the light rakes across and the texture pops. Then shoot it again with the light from the front (window behind you). Compare. The side-lit version should look three-dimensional and alive; the front-lit one flat. Keep both.

Exercise 14.6 ⭐⭐ — White card, black card. Set up any object in soft side light. Shoot it three ways: (a) bare, no cards; (b) with a white card on the shadow side; (c) with a black card on the shadow side. Note in one line what each did — the white should lift the shadows (lower contrast), the black should deepen them (more shape/drama). This pair of cards is your contrast control for the rest of your life.

Exercise 14.7 ⭐⭐ — Tame the chrome. Photograph a shiny metal object (a spoon, a kettle, foil-wrapped chocolate) and deliberately build its reflections: place a white card just out of frame on the camera side so the surface fills with clean bright tone, and a black card on the far edge to draw a defining dark line. Compare to a naive shot with no cards. The goal: make the metal read as gleaming and expensive, not blotchy and cheap.

Exercise 14.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Bright-field a glass of liquid. Backlight a clear glass of water or juice against a large white surface (a lit white wall, a sheet of paper with a lamp behind it). Aim for the bright-field look: glowing liquid, edges defined by thin dark lines, clean white background. The challenge is keeping the glass clean and the background even. This is the foundation of beverage photography.

Part C — The one-window setup (Shoot This)

Exercise 14.9 ⭐ — Build the setup. At your kitchen window, build the §14.3 tabletop setup: window as the source (add diffusion if the sun is direct), object in front of/beside it, white bounce card filling the front. Photograph one simple object. The exercise is building the setup correctly, not the picture — get the geometry right (light back-and- side, card opposite) and the picture will follow.

Exercise 14.10 ⭐⭐ — Front vs. back light, same object. Take one object and shoot it twice with nothing changed but light direction: once front-lit (window behind camera), once back-side-lit (window across the subject from you, behind/beside the object), with a bounce card filling the front in the second. Keep both. The back-side version should separate from the background and feel dimensional; the front version flat. Write one sentence on what the rotation bought you.

Exercise 14.11 ⭐⭐ — The bounce-card ladder. With back-side window light on an object, shoot five frames moving your white bounce card progressively closer to the subject (start far, end almost touching the frame edge). Lay them in order. You'll see the shadows climb a smooth ladder from deep/dramatic to bright/gentle. Choose the one with the best balance and say why. This is your tabletop lighting ratio.

Exercise 14.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Replace the window with one light. Recreate your best one-window shot at night, using one off-camera flash or a cheap LED panel fired through diffusion, back-and-to-the-side, with the same white bounce card. Match the look of the daytime window version as closely as you can. This proves you understand the logic of the setup, not just the window — and it frees you from the weather and the hour.

Part D — Food and the hero angle (Shoot This)

Exercise 14.13 ⭐ — Turn the plate around. Photograph any meal or drink you're about to eat, front-lit, the way most people do. Then rotate the plate so your existing light comes from behind it, add a white card on the camera side, and shoot again. Compare. This single rotation is the most common fix in food photography; feel it work on your own dinner.

Exercise 14.14 ⭐⭐ — Three hero angles. Choose one dish or drink with some height or layering (a sandwich, a stacked breakfast, a tall drink). Within its freshness window, shoot it from all three hero angles: straight down, three-quarter, and eye level. Choose the best and write one sentence on why that angle suited this food. (Tall things usually want eye level; flat things, overhead.)

Exercise 14.15 ⭐⭐ — Capture a "just now" gesture. Make a food photograph that includes one honest "just now" cue: a pour mid-stream, a bite taken, a fork lifting a strand, steam off something genuinely hot (dark background + backlight), or condensation on a cold drink. Shoot in a fast burst to catch it. The cue should make the food feel alive and being eaten right now.

Exercise 14.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Honest styling, start to finish. Style and shoot one dish from scratch: pick the best individual pieces, build a little height or structure, control the mess, brush a touch of real oil for a natural sheen if appropriate, add a color-accent garnish last, light it back-side with fill, choose the hero angle, and capture it at its ninety-second peak. Write a short note on every styling decision — and confirm each one shows the food's real best rather than misrepresenting it.

Part E — Background, props, and clean edges (Shoot This)

Exercise 14.17 ⭐⭐ — The negative-space frame. Photograph one small dish or object placed off-center on a power point (rule of thirds), surrounded by a generous field of clean, empty surface. Resist the urge to fill the frame. The empty space should read as elegance and leave room for an imaginary headline. Compare to a tight, frame-filling version of the same subject; note which feels more "expensive."

Exercise 14.18 ⭐⭐ — Build and break a prop arrangement. Style a food or product scene by adding props one at a time. After each addition, photograph it and ask "better, or just busier?" Keep shooting until you've clearly gone one prop too far. Then identify the frame just before it got busy — that's usually your keeper. Submit the "one too many" frame and the keeper side by side, and name the prop that broke it.

Exercise 14.19 ⭐⭐ — Make a sweep. Build a seamless sweep: tape a sheet of paper or board high on a wall and curve it smoothly down onto the table with no hard corner. Photograph a small object on it. Then add a light or lamp aimed at the background to blow it to clean white. The object should appear to float in edgeless tone. Note where any remaining seam or gradient shows, and how you'd fix it.

Exercise 14.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Front-to-back sharp, the close-up. Photograph a small object at a slight angle, close up, so that a single frame cannot hold the near and far edges both sharp. Document the problem (show the soft far edge). Then solve it as best your gear allows: true focus stacking if you can (lock the camera, shoot several frames refocusing in small steps, merge), or the phone substitutes (rely on the tiny sensor's deep DoF at a normal distance, or shoot near- and far-focused frames and pick the better). Explain which path you took and why.

Part F — Eye Training and the Light Log

Exercise 14.21 ⭐ — Add a product-light entry to your Light Log. For three days, add one Light Log entry about how food or products are lit around you: the café that back-lights its pastries beautifully, the supermarket's flat overhead glare on the deli case, the restaurant menu photo that's obviously front-lit and dead. Name the direction and quality each time. You're training the eye that §14.1–14.3 depend on.

Exercise 14.22 ⭐⭐ — Audit a menu or catalog. Find a printed menu, a food-delivery app, or a product catalog and critique five images: for each, name the surface type, guess the light direction, judge the hero angle, and flag the single biggest weakness. Pick the best of the five and say what it did right. No camera needed — this is pure seeing.

Exercise 14.23 ⭐⭐ — Spot the styling. Look closely at three polished food advertisements. For each, identify the honest freshness cues you can see (sheen, steam, condensation, garnish, a "just now" gesture) and speculate about how they were achieved. Then ask: does anything look too perfect to be the real food? Where's the line between styling and deception in each?

Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 14.24 ⭐⭐ — Depth-of-field choice (with Ch. 4). Photograph the same small product twice: once at a wide aperture (soft, contextual background blur) and once at a moderate aperture for more front-to-back sharpness. Decide which serves the product better and why. Connect your reasoning explicitly to Chapter 4's depth-of-field levers (aperture, distance, focal length).

Exercise 14.25 ⭐⭐ — Color harmony on the table (with Ch. 7). Style a food or product shot using a deliberate color relationship from Chapter 7: a complementary accent (a green garnish on a red dish), or an analogous, harmonious palette (warm wood, warm food, warm props). Shoot it. Name the color relationship you used and judge whether it strengthened the image.

Exercise 14.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — The exposure call (with Ch. 3). Set up a high-key product shot (object on a white sweep, bright and airy) and a low-key one (object on black, moody) of the same subject. For each, write the full exposure you chose (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO) and explain how you metered — remembering that a camera meter wants to make a white background grey and a black background grey, so you must override it. Connect to Chapter 3's metering and the histogram.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 14.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — The "irresistible ordinary" series. Over one week, photograph five of the most boring objects you can find — a paperclip, a glass of tap water, a plain egg, a single screw, a slice of white bread — and make each one genuinely beautiful using only window light, diffusion, and cards. Lay the five out together. The series is a portfolio-grade statement: there are no boring subjects, only boring light. Choose the strongest for your Portfolio Checkpoint and say what its single best decision was.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each at the table with a camera before reading them — in product and food work, the slow, patient attempt is the entire lesson.