Ever had a gorgeous plate of food in front of you, taken a picture of it and wondered why it doesn’t look half as appetising in the photo as it does in life? Well here are some simple tips to get you on your way to taking better photographs of food.
1. When creating your dish for the purpose of photography make sure you use the freshest ingredients and pick the best specimens with as few flaws as possible.
2. If your food requires cooking don’t cook it all the way, take it off the heat early so that the ingredients especially vegetables still hold their shape and keep their rich colours. Take your picture then return to the heat to finish cooking before eating.
3. Lighting is one of the most important factors in creating a scrumptious image of food. Food looks best when backlit, or lit from the side. Never photograph food with your camera flash on. Set up your key light, that is the strongest brightest light source, from the rear or side and fill in from the front or front/side using a reflector or light source set to half the power of the key light.
Front Lighting V’s Back Lighting
Notice how flat the food looks when using a key light at the front…And how much more attractive it looks when it is back lit. So, always turn off your camera flash.
4. Save some ingredients from the recipe to place in the background, be careful not to go over board here, you don’t want the shot to look too busy or detract from the main dish. Try playing around with depth of field throwing the supporting elements in the background out of focus. The wider the aperture (lower the f stop number) the shallower the depth of field will be.
Use supporting ingredients in the background
5. Tell a story. Think about what it you want the image to say, what’s the history, what kind of feeling do you want to portray.
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