Behind the Blog: My Studio is My Dining Room

A dining room table pushed against a large front window, set with a cutting board of strawberries and blueberries, a vase of yellow flowers, and wooden chairs.
The whole studio: a table, a window, and good light.

Folks ask, every so often, where I shoot the food. I think they picture a studio; some bright white room with stands and a backdrop and intent. I love that for them.

I shoot in my dining room.

Here’s the whole secret. We’ve got a big front window, and when we’re not actually using the dining room for dining, the table lives pushed back toward it. That window is the best light in the house: soft, generous, and free. Most of what you see on this blog gets photographed right there. I haul my cutting board or my ingredients over, set up, and shoot. (The rest gets done outside on the deck, which is the same idea with better weather and worse bugs.)

The one honest piece of actual photography equipment in this whole operation is a collapsible reflector.

The table from closer in, with a round collapsible photo reflector propped at the left edge of the frame beside the berries.
The one real piece of gear, standing at left.

It’s the white disc you can see standing on the left. All it does is catch the window light and bounce it back into the shadow side of the food, which sounds like nothing until you see the before and after.

Strawberries and blueberries on a wooden board lit only by window light, soft shadows on the near side.
Without the reflector.
The same berries with the reflector bouncing light back in, shadows filled and the frame brighter.
With the reflector. Subtle, but brighter and more appealing.

Left photo no reflector; right photo reflector. It’s subtle, I know; we’re not talking about a different planet. But the shadows fill in, the whole frame brightens, and the berries start to look like something you’d want to eat instead of something you’d want to question. Small change, real difference.

And then there’s the truth.

A Domino's pizza box stood on its side as a makeshift reflector beside a plate of cookies, while a gray cat leans in to sniff the plate.

Sometimes I cannot find the reflector. Or I can find it, but it’s upstairs and I am downstairs, and on certain days the gap between those two facts feels insurmountable. On those days, a Domino’s box leaned up on its side bounces light just fine. It is not elegant. It is not in any photography book. It works. (Callie felt the shoot required supervision.)

That’s it. That’s the studio. A window, a table, a reflector I lose on a rotating basis, and a pizza box understudy. And yes, that’s a Chewy box in the wide shot up top; there is nearly always a Chewy or an Amazon box on this table while I’m shooting, and at some point this year I stopped bothering to move it out of frame. That’s the actual room. The light was always the point; everything else, box included, is just what’s holding it up.

P.S. Callie has never once improved a photo and has actively ruined several, and I would not trade her for a real studio.

P.P.S. As of this writing I do not know where the reflector is. This is not a joke for the post; I genuinely cannot find it. If you see it, it’s the white disc, about two feet across. I swear it was here last week.

P.P.P.S. Those berries went on to become last week’s fruit salad. Nothing on this blog goes to waste, least of all a BOGO strawberry.