In this section I provide links to various articles and videos that explain some of the tricks of the trade. I have found these useful and you may too.

Food Styling - the Hamburger as Hero

How does McDonalds, Burger King and Carl's Junior get such luscious images of their burgers? Well sure, the lighting is excellent but the actual preparation of the burger is where the "money" is spent. Have a look at this video:

Green Screens - Pretty Much Everywhere ...

I am thinking about possibly painting part of my studio with a "green" screen as the possibilities are enormous. While these are used much more in video and film that in regular photography, I believe that the possibilities are quite powerful for a photographer. Check out this video:

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Demo from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Focus Stacking - End of Tilt Shift ...

Photographers who do these incredible high end ads for watches and jewelery generally used large format cameras that enabled them to control the plane of focus by tilting and shifting the lens board. Of course, this required an expensive and heavy large format camera (4x5 or larger), an enormous amount of light due to the very small apertures and slow film used (typically f32 and ASA 50) and film processing.

However image processing tools now allow a photographer to use a 35 mm camera and take multiple images - each focused at a slightly different point on the object. The various images are combined in software - the "sharp" part of each individual image is used.

One major impeditment is that when really close in, changing the focus also changes the distance of the lense and this changes the size and perspective -- so distortions between images have to be accounted for or you will get some nasty artifacts.