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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

If you're doing still photos of food, surely you can just put more light on the subject or use a longer exposure.

With modern sensors, ISO is mainly limited by thermal noise. Astrophotographers often use cooled sensors to allow higher sensitivity, but it's tricky to cool it very much without moisture from the air condensing inside or on the lenses.

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> If you're doing still photos of food, surely you can just put more light on the subject or use a longer exposure.

Longer exposure, yes, though that means having to set up a tripod for every shot which significantly increases the time it takes to get a shoot done.

Turning up the lighting is very difficult for food photography. Lights are hot and food doesn't last long under studio lights. (That's also why a lot of food photography has such shallow depth of field — a wider aperture lets in more light.)

Another option is to use a body that offers stabilization. Olympus has gotten their stabilization good enough that you can shoot handheld at pretty slow shutter speeds: https://blog.mingthein.com/2016/11/02/review-olympus-e-m1-ma...

I guess you haven't read this then :)

https://blog.mingthein.com/2016/08/19/stabilisation-is-good-...

He wrote that before he wrote the article I linked to. Also, this article mentions some deficiencies of stabilization in certain circumstances but nowhere does it claim that it's useless.

Oh, of course. I agree with you that it is not useless and I myself rely on it quite frequently. I guess I should have made my point clear. The relevant point of the blog post is that IS is not very effective at high resolution. I don't know if you've shot with a 5DSR or any other 50+ MP camera It is very tricky to get a super sharp image since the tiniest bit of movement gets picked up. I can only imagine it gets worse at 120MP..

Right, which is why I think Olympus has had success with it. They primarily (maybe only?) make micro 4/3 bodies, so the resolution is still relatively low (some of their bodies are at 16MP, others 20). I don't photograph food, but I'd think that a stabilized m4/3 body would be very useful for that purpose if one wants to avoid bringing a tripod.

>Turning up the lighting is very difficult for food photography. Lights are hot and food doesn't last long under studio lights. (That's also why a lot of food photography has such shallow depth of field — a wider aperture lets in more light.)

Sure, but that's only if you use non-LED continuous lighting. Alternatively, you could use flash and then not need a longer exposure. As long as you can balance the ambient with a low enough continuous light that it wont affect the food. Plenty of ways to skin the cat..

Flashes, and external lights are not really realistic in a busy restaurant environment. Majority of my shots are using natural light. I usually scope out places ahead of time, find the best seating by time of day, near windows.

I guess we all assumed still pictures of food in a studio instead of just asking you :)

Food photography is an art in its own right. Photographing real food is super hard, it wilts before your eyes. Many food pictures are of extremely expensive fakes! Hard to make the fake, but once you have it it is so much easier to work with than organic material in the studio.

Absolutely true about the fakes. A lot of times they use wax models of food.

I remember one example, most photographs of breakfast cereal (for advertisements or that appear on the box) use white school glue for the milk. Real milk is too thin and also ends up looking bluish in the photos.

Nice set of samples:

https://petapixel.com/2016/03/24/photos-show-secret-tricks-f...

Spot the non-food items :)

Astrophotographers also care about quantum efficiency and often shoot at higher ISOs. Astrophotographers use cooled sensors for a different reason. Long exposures build up heat, and heat causes noise, which is why you need to cool overclocked CPUs too.

Thermal noise is not relevant for food photography. Input referred read noise will dominate here 100% of the time, unless you're taking pictures of things lit so dark that you can't see them yourself.

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