So, I saw these crazy cool pictures online, right? Food just floating in the air. Looked amazing. And I thought, ‘Pfft, how hard can that be?’ Famous last words, let me tell you.
My first bright idea? Just toss some fruit up and snap a pic real fast. Yeah, genius. Ended up with blurry mush on the floor and zero good shots. My dog was thrilled, though. Clean-up crew on standby. It was a proper mess, and honestly, a waste of good berries.
Okay, so clearly throwing things wasn’t the pro method. Shocker. I did a tiny bit of digging – and I mean tiny. Turns out, it’s not magic. It’s wires. Or sticks. Or some other fiddly bits holding the food up that you don’t see in the final picture. Mind. Blown. Not really, but it felt like a revelation after my fruit-flinging disaster. I felt a bit silly, actually, for not thinking of that sooner.
My Super Professional Setup
Right, so ‘equipment.’ I raided my kitchen drawers and that one junk drawer everyone has. You know the one. Found some old fishing line – super thin, perfect, I thought. And skewers. Lots of skewers from that BBQ I had last summer. My ‘studio’? The kitchen counter, right by the window for ‘natural light,’ darling. Fancy, huh?
I decided to start with something simple, or so I thought. Some nice, bright strawberries. Seemed easy enough to handle. Getting them to ‘float’ on that fishing line though… let’s just say my patience was tested. They’d spin, they’d droop, they’d generally refuse to cooperate. I tried taping the line to a couple of tall glasses on either side of the ‘scene.’ It looked absolutely ridiculous, like some sort of weird science experiment gone wrong. My cat kept trying to bat at the strawberries, which didn’t help things either.
Then I started clicking. Took a million photos. Seriously, my camera roll was full. From every conceivable angle. Some with the berries looking vaguely suspended, some where the berries had already given up and fallen onto the counter. And here’s a big tip I almost forgot, and nearly ruined everything: you gotta take a picture of just the background. No food, no wires, nothing. They call it a ‘clean plate’ or something similar. Super important for the editing part later, apparently. I read that somewhere and just hoped it was true.
Wrestling with Software
Alright, photos done. Now for the ‘levitation’ part, the bit where the magic is supposed to happen. I dumped them onto my old laptop and opened up some free photo editing thingy I found. The plan was simple in my head: erase the fishing line. Easy peasy, right? WRONG. Oh, so wrong. My first few tries looked like a toddler attacked the photo with an eraser tool. There were smudges everywhere. The berries looked like they had weird see-through scars. It was a disaster.
I remembered that ‘clean plate’ shot. Thank goodness for small mercies. After a lot of fiddling, and probably watching a two-minute tutorial video that I barely understood (they talk so fast!), I kind of figured out you could layer the food shot on top of the clean background shot. Then, you carefully rub out the wires. It was still a massive pain. My hand was cramping, and I think I sighed loud enough for the neighbors to hear about a dozen times. It took forever for each berry.
So, did it work? Kinda! After what felt like hours, and a lot of squinting at the screen, I had a picture where the strawberries looked like they were, you know, floating. Ish. It wasn’t gonna win any awards, that’s for sure. My kids said it looked “okay,” which is high praise from them. But hey, they weren’t on the counter anymore, visually speaking. They were airborne!
What I Learned (The Hard Way):
- Patience. You need tons of it. More than you think you have. Then find some more.
- Thin wire or fishing line is better than string, but still a nightmare to hide in the photo later. It catches the light!
- Good light is your absolute best friend, even if it’s just from a window. Don’t try to do this in a dimly lit cave.
- That ‘clean plate’ thing? Not optional. Seriously. Do not skip this step. You’ll regret it.
- Editing is where the real trickery happens, and it’s not as quick or as simple as those five-minute craft videos on the internet make it seem. Those people are wizards or liars. Maybe both.
So yeah, that was my adventure into making food fly. Would I do it again? Maybe. If I have a whole afternoon to kill and a new pack of calming tea. It’s definitely more work than just, you know, eating the food. Which I did, with great satisfaction, afterwards. But the one decent shot I got? I’m kinda proud of it, in a ‘look what I accidentally managed to do after a lot of frustration’ sort of way. It’s now my phone wallpaper.
