Food Photographers and Food Photography . . . Are you hungry?
Author: weshoot
Food photography has been with us . . . well, since there was photography. But then, there is FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY. That “It looks so good, I can taste it!” photography. That “It’s making me hungry photography!” You know what I am talking about. Prime examples are the Red Lobster video ads with butter dripping off seafood. Don’t they make you hungry, even after you just ate? Now, look at your food images. Are they the victim of flat lighting Do they lack color? Do they make anyone hungry?
Almost everyone has a digital camera. Some have better digital cameras than others. Many have a small strobe built into the camera, while others may use a flash unit that fits in a shoe on the camera. For a commercial pro, that would be the lighting of last resort just to document something. This is the worst lighting one could use, especially for food. Any small thing or element that is white or very light gets blown out and loses detail, like sour cream or whipped cream. If the food image is mostly white or light colored, like vanilla ice cream, the strobe and camera may automatically adjust to make it gray, or a darker color, instead. Did you ever wonder why the image you tried to take that reflected the flash back displayed as dark or a sickly shade of brown? That is because the auto-exposure feature of the flash read only the brightest spot in the frame and shut down the strobe before it was able to light the darker areas. Silverware, other bright metal, and glass have a habit of reflecting very bright hot spots with flat lighting.
Great food photography all has one thing in common: great lighting, which includes positioning the lighting to better enhance the food. It is critical. It all starts there. See Example 1.
Example 1 - Click on image to enlarge.
See how the glistening highlights make this look juicy and delicious? To make better-looking food images, the main lighting comes from the back, sides, or above to reflect on the food (in this case with a soft box). Overall ceiling room lights don’t serve this purpose, nor does a flash mounted directly on a camera. To see examples of what I see as overall room lighting or direct flash lighting for a similar food dish as Example 1, click here . Of course, the services of a great food styl ist and a lot of post-production work is done in Photoshop to get the color and look found in Example 1.
It is said that a picture is worth a whole lot of words (1000, 10000, or the amount to be determined by the viewer) . I say that a great food image is worth that many more sales. If you are selling food, it pays to do a lot more work creating your food images, or you could hire We Shoot. You can find us at weshoot.com.
– Gary Silverstein
Tags: food, food photographer, food photography, food stylist, http://weshoot.com, photographer, photography, we shoot
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