Food Photography

What is food photography?

As name suggests food photography is an art of photographing food!
Art is not just in clicking the picture but also on how to make it look more enticing. World is full of food lovers and great cooks. All of these people would like to see great pictures of food.

"Its a fact that food is first consumed by eyes, then nose and then mouth. Its important to pleases all these senses." So if you are selling food, you know what is the first thing you want to do for customers to like your place even before they are served your delicacies!

Food photography is not as simple as it may sound there are various factors that play key role in getting good food photographs. One need to master various techniques other than photography for becoming a good food photographer. Some of these are:

• Lighting
• Styling
• Art direction
• Understanding colors, textures, etc.
  

Few tips for food photography:

• Shoot with mild lighting to capture those beautiful textures created. You may want to use harder light to bring out the overall shape, let the food make this choice for you. 
• Do not shoot in dark, avoid using flash. If required shoot outside in open natural light.
• Use less quantity of food than what you would serve someone to eat.
• Shoot from an lower angle, unless you are getting a very interesting top shot. Lower angle will help you create the depth.
• Compose your subject to fit tightly in to the frame, you can choose to leave a little space for cropping freedom during post processing.
• Allow food to spillover naturally, you can try and be more artistic but overdoing may spoil the photograph.
• Shoot with shallow depth of filed so that your focus is concentrated on the main subject. Use macro lens if you have one.
  
• Capture the temperature, make it look hot or cold based on types of dish you are photographing. You can make food look hot by using a bit of vegetable oil on it.  It will also avoid food from looking dry. You can make food look cold by suing a few ice cubed or creating mild vapor around it.
• Remember your main subject is food, try to avoid picturing other decoration around it. Decorations on the food is the key things to capture.
• Try both landscape and portrait shots, chose what looks better sometimes you will get both nice.
• Have a back up, food may look fresh for a certain period of time. If your shoot is taking more time than expected and the food looses its charm you must plan to replace it with a very similar looking stand by. 
• Choose the distance and position of light carefully. Placing light on the top, behind or some other weird angle will not highlight the key textures that you may want to capture. Distance of light will control the intensity and glare on food item.
• Use tripod, its always better to use tripod as while shooting using mild lighting and indoor you may have too shoot at very slow shutter speed and you would not want to create blurred pictures of those beautiful mouth watering dishes in front of you. 
• Consider using multiples to create a pattern.
• Do not shoot less quantity of food in bigger container unless you are trying out something creative.

Related reading:

http://www.foodportfolio.com/blog/food_photography/food_photgraphy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_photography
http://www.digital-photography-school.com/angles-for-food-photography