How can I photograph steam rising from food with a Canon Rebel T5 and natural window light?
Asked 3/3/2016
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2 answers
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I’m trying to photograph a bowl of soup with visible steam using a Canon Rebel T5 and the 18-55mm kit lens. I’m shooting near a window in daylight. I originally thought changing shutter speed was affecting white balance, but I meant exposure. What camera settings or lighting setup work best for making steam show clearly in a food photo?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
15
First of all, the steam is hard to shoot on a photo. A lot of pictures you see with steam are composites of the photo + steam.
To take a photo of the steam in real time you first need a dark background, and then you need to use a flash in a very focused way (use a snoot) pointing to the steam and only that.
The flash normally is at 90° of the camera axis.
Then try to use the normal combination of speed to iluminate the scene and fstop to iluminate the steam.
P.S.
my white balance gets messed up
Probably you are refering to the exposure. The white balance is independent to the shutter speed.
Originally by user37321. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user37321
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Steam is difficult to capture, especially with only window light. The most useful setup is to make the steam stand out against a darker background and light it from the side or behind, rather than from the camera position.
A common approach is:
- use a dark background behind the bowl
- light the steam separately with a focused flash or other directional light
- place that light roughly 90° to the camera axis so it catches the steam without flattening it
Then expose the food normally and adjust aperture/shutter to balance the scene while keeping the steam visible.
Also, shutter speed does not change white balance by itself. If color shifts happen under fluorescent lighting, that can be caused by AC flicker; using around 1/60 or 1/125 in 60 Hz regions, or 1/50 or 1/100 in 50 Hz regions, can help. But with daylight from a window, that usually isn’t the issue.
In short: for clearly visible steam, background and lighting direction matter more than a specific camera setting.
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