Food and Food PhotographyFood and Food Photography One of the most common requests for tips that we get is for advice on how to take good photographs of food. If your house is anything like mine it has a shelf somewhere full of cook books (my wife is rather addicted to them) - most of which are filled with stunning photos of all kinds of food dishes. Some of them are mouth watering to read. Taking good photos of food is not as easy as it looks - lighting, composition, angles etc are all potential problem areas. We thought we'd take a look around the web and find some of the best food photography tips available. There is not a lot written on the topic but here are some quality starting points for budding food photographers: The digital frontier has changed the way we shoot and the things we can shoot successfully. The benefit of being able to review the shot instantly, and know for certain that what you have just captured is usable, is absolutely invaluable. This applies especially to food photography where most of your time will go into setup and preparation. For one, I knew that shooting food is very unlike architectural and product photography, where you want your entire subject in crystalline, razor-sharp focus so the viewer can pore over the details for hours. Photographing three pan-fried scallops on a risotto cake is more about appealing to--yep, you guessed it--those mighty little endorphins in the viewer's brain. But because not even the twenty-first century has brought us a technological device capable of translating taste or smell from an image into an actual sensory experience, photographers are left with two other attributes of food: color and texture. Translated this means: get close with your camera, focus on that texture, be bold with your choices of props and styling, and carefully plan ahead with your dishes, backdrops, lighting, and other environmental factors. Key ingredients for great food photography: A solid understanding of your camera. You'll need a good grounding in the operation of the features of your camera, especially those concerning basic operation, focus, exposure compenstation, white balance, image resolution and size, and macro and flash modes operation. Pick the highest resolution image format on your camera along with the lowest image compression setting. Often, images are enlarged and cropped for publication and the extra pixels produce better pictures. Because food deteriorates quickly, you want to be ready to take pictures quickly without much delay after the food has been setup and arranged.
Freshly prepared, cleanly presented foods. Just the same as attending a wedding, everything in food photography should be made fresh, and presented cleanly and promptly. Food oxidizes and changes color and texture quickly, especially fruits. Ice cream melts at a rapid rate, so the shorter the time between scooping and picture taking, the better. (Unless melted ice cream is the point of the photo shoot.) At the same time, you can't rush so fast that you leave bits of food here and there. Keep the scene as pristine as possible. You'll find that a moment spent wiping the edge of a bowl clean, removing a stray bit of food, etc. will be time worth spending now vs. many more minutes in a photo editing program doing retouching work. Wipe up any stray gravies and sauces, remove any stray debris.
Balanced color choices. A quick beginner's art class or book will have a basic color circle and complementary color chart for reference. In most cases, having a good selection of colors will enhance the presentation of the food. For example, if you're taking pictures of red apples, a red background of almost the same color probably won't add as much spark to the apples as would another color such as yellow, green or even plain black. Naturally, you can play around with the variations in color until you find a combination that suits your taste, or, if you've been a studious beginner, you can refer to your clippings folder (where you've collected numerous examples of photographs, advertisements, and other graphic images for just this purpose) to quickly find and come up with ideas when you can't do so right away.
Carefully placed focus & depth of field. You'll find that with careful use of focus and depth of field adjustments, you can bring snap into an otherwise dull photograph. On cameras lacking manual focus, you can usually depress the shutter button halfway down when you have the autofocus marks centered upon the area of interest to lock focus at that distance. You can recompose later by moving the camera about while keeping the shutter button depressed halfway. Depth of field or aperature settings on automatic cameras are usually missing, so you'll have to take whatever you get. On cameras with manual focus, you will adjust the focus to the point you want, then simply let the focus distance remain fixed while you move the camera about. Most cameras with manual focus will have manual depth of field or aperature control, and again, you can simply set them at whatever is most appropriate for your picture. Wider or more open for a shallow depth of field, smaller or more closed for a deeper one. When you look at a scene, take a look to see if any part of it grabs your attention right away. It may be the yellow color of a lemon, or the succulent look of a burger, or even the shape and texture of a fruit. Whatever it is, look again at the entire scene and think about whether blurring them out of focus and out of attention would make them less distracting. Sometimes, you'll find that by doing so, you'll have a much stronger image - one that almost pulls the viewer's eyes directly to the point of sharp focus and attention. On the other hand, if the entire subject needs to be in sharp focus, you may find that you'll need to set the aperature as small as possible to get a wide depth of field, with sharp focus from near to far. You'll soon learn that for many foods, you can blur most of the scene, crop closely, and come out with an even better picture than you'd otherwise imagine.
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