Old bench wood for food photography

Here are couple of shots I used the wooden boards for

Fresh Corn Meal Prep

Food photography Lightroom preset for yellow and green tones.

First mushroom Haul of the season

Beautiful mushrooms from the forest across the street.

Where did the bench come from? I believe it’s in the old bench from the GDR times my husband’s parents kept. The wood was super dry and porous and absolutely not safe to be set on. They planned on throwing the planks away some time in the future, which would have been there so much faith waste, these are absolutely gorgeous.

It’s pretty hard to paint new wood this way to make it look old. I’m so happy I spotted this bench 10 years ago when we were shooting some random embarrassing photos in the garden. I kept the bench in the back of my mind and as soon as we heard the parents are going to demolish it, we claimed the planks.

For a while, I pretty much hated the planks being loose and always planned on screwing them together in someway. But I never had to space to store a huge board. We were traveling at that time and had to put everything into a small storage unit.

I’m glad I didn’t screw them together or onto a board. I now can you lay them out on the table in the way I like it. The only issue with them is, that the back planks are a tiny bit thinner than the sitting area planks. The sitting area planks are also a little bit wider. Sometime is it looks a little bit weird in the picture, so I get tempted to cut the planks in half and have an even, but more squared backdrop.

On the other hand, long planks are better for the 16:9 video format. The only augmentation added to the planks so far, was to seal them with an acrylic varnish. The paint was chipping off a little bit every time I used them creating a mess on the table. Plus, I didn’t want to lose all the paint over time.