food photography

what is food photography?

Food photography is a still life photography genre used to create attractive still life photographs of food. As a specialization of commercial photography, its output is used in advertisements, magazines, packaging, menus or cookbooks. Professional food photography is a collaborative effort, usually involving an art director, a photographer, a food stylist, a prop stylist and their assistants. With the advent of social media, amateur food photography has gained popularity among restaurant diners.

Whether you want to be a professional food photographer, or simply present your images on Instagram to grow your following, there are certain tips and techniques you should use to improve your skills. We have put together a comprehensive guide on food photography to take your pictures to the next level.

getting started

If you want to know how to photograph food, a good tip, to begin with, is to look at examples of professional food photography. You can find these on packaging, on the websites of retailers or high-end restaurants, on menus, and in the online portfolios of food photographers who actually work in this field. Studying these images will help you to understand what is expected within the industry. See how polished they look: it’s not as simple as snapping a shot of your lunch with your iPhone.

There is a lot of work and thought that goes on behind the scenes to create even deceptively simple images. These food photography tips will help you to understand how the professionals do it.

We will now talk about some food photography tips and techniques to help you get started. To begin, here are camera and equipment requirements for food photography:

Cameras and Equipment

While a lot of beginner food photographers start with something as simple as an iPhone, when you’re looking to get serious about food photography, procuring a good DSLR camera and equipment can make all the difference.

While full-frame digital cameras are often recommended by professionals, you can start out with a cropped sensor camera in the beginning. Cropped sensor cameras are more affordable but they behave differently with lenses and produce images that are slightly different. As the name suggests, they produce images that are slightly cropped. Full-frame cameras can cover a wider area.

camera lenses

Prime lenses or fixed lenses are often best for food photography. This is because they offer wider apertures and hence a greater control over depth of field. Either a 80mm or a 50mm prime lens is most often recommended for food photography when you are using a full-frame digital camera.

other camera equipment

A tripod is a must-have when it comes to food photography. Tripods keep your camera stable and eliminate noise resulting from the camera shaking in your hand.

While a lot of food photographers prefer natural light for food photography, using artificial lighting can give you a lot more control in a studio set-up. It can be helpful to have some flashguns, moonlights, light stands and light bounces to help you adjust the lighting to your exact requirements.

Photography props are also a helpful and important addition when it comes to food photography. Keeping some pretty dinnerware and ceramics on hand as well as fancy cutting boards and napkins can help you set up and style your shots and produce beautiful results.

using your smartphone for food photography

Everywhere you look these days, people are busy taking photos of their lunch or dinner and posting the results on social media – some look great, but others look rather unappetizing! So, how do you get great looking photos of your food using your phone camera? Here we’re going to look at how to improve your smartphone food photography in a few easy steps.

From styling your food, to lighting, composition and post-processing, if you follow these tips you’ll be well on your way to creating food photos that will be the envy of your followers on social media.

how to take great smartphone food photos

think about lighting

Before you even start to take photos of food, you need to plan, and that involves taking the light into account. Food tends to look best under natural light, so to get the best results, you need to be shooting next to a window that doesn’t have direct sunlight on it.

Professional food photographers tend to backlight or sidelight food shots, as this gives a nice contrast and look to the food. You’ll need to place your plate side on to the window for side light, and the back of the plate to the window for back light.

Under no circumstances should you be tempted to use the flash on your phone’s camera to light a food shot! Flash is harsh, tends to make food look flat and greasy, and leaves a hard shadow round your dish, as well as adding color casts that can be hard to get rid of.

Professional food photographers do use studio flash or flashguns to light food, but they have them diffused and controlled, so the results are a whole lot better than you will ever get with built-in camera flash.

food styling

Yes, food styling is an actual thing. Some people even make a career out of it. All those great food shots you see have been carefully styled to make them look good.

There are all sorts of tricks the food stylists use to make food look better in photos, and you can use some of those ideas to make your dinner look amazing on social media.

Make sure you take the photo before you eat the food. That sounds obvious, but you know you’ve done it before!

Take some time to arrange the food on the plate so it looks appetizing.

Make sure there’s no ugly drips or splashes of sauce on the edges of the plate.

If you’re using props like cutlery or tablecloths, make sure they’re clean and look harmonious together.

Move any dirty forks, dirty napkins, or ugly salt shakers out of the frame before shooting.

downloading camera apps

Your built-in smartphone camera does have limitations, so consider using a dedicated camera phone app to take your photos with. Adobe Lightroom mobile is a popular choice, but there are others like the totally free Open Camera app, or MuseCam App.

Find one that suits you and your skill level. These apps allow you much more control over how you shoot your photos. You can manually adjust shutter speed, ISO, white balance and other settings when you shoot using these apps.

try shooting in raw format

If your phone has the capability to shoot in RAW format – and a lot of them do – then I would advise using it instead of JPEG. Pro photographers usually shoot in RAW format because it is totally uncompressed, and contains all the information from a photo.

JPEG format is compressed, and is called a ‘lossy’ format because the camera discards some of the image information to enable the compression. This is why JPEG file sizes are much smaller than RAW format files.

Also, when you shoot JPEG, your camera adds things like sharpening and saturation boosts to your photos automatically. RAW format files have also had nothing applied to them in camera; you retain total control over what adjustments you make in editing, and you can edit things like shadows and highlights that you can’t do with JPEG files.

If you do shoot in RAW, you’ll need a RAW file converter to work on the photos after you’ve taken them. Lightroom mobile will let you do that on your phone, but it’s often better to upload your RAW images to a computer and work on them on a large screen where you can see any changes you make far better.

You can get totally free RAW converters like GIMP, or you can get editing software such as Luminar, where you can work directly on your RAW files to make adjustments before saving your finalized image as a JPEG.

If your phone doesn’t support RAW format, go into the camera settings and select the highest resolution JPEG settings it has. The larger the JPEG, the higher the image quality.

use a tripod in low light

If you’re shooting in low-light situations, hand-holding your phone will result in blurry photos, as the shutter will need to stay open longer to capture the image so it’s correctly exposed. This is the number one problem with photographing food in a restaurant.

To get sharp, professional-looking photos, you need to take along a phone tripod. They’re not expensive – you can buy a smartphone tripod for around $10 on Amazon, and it can usually fit in your bag or pocket, if necessary. Just don’t be overly obvious when taking the picture, because other diners don’t want to be bothered by your photo-taking antics while they eat.

check your background

Before you start taking photos, look at what is behind your food and in the frame of your phone camera. A plain background with no clutter is best to showcase the food. Check the color of your background – is it too bright and overpowering? Can you change it, or move to a different position?

Are there dirty dishes or other things in the background? Either remove them, move your food, or change the angle of your shot so that they are not in the photo.

work the angles

Get creative with your shots. Most people will only take a photo of food from directly above or from straight ahead at eye level. When you get a different angle on your food, the image stands out from the norm. Try shooting from the sides, or get down level with the plate and shoot from there.

Why not try a close-up shot of a particular part of the food? Take lots of shots, and move to a different position after each one. If you have lots of images, it makes it easier to find one or two really good ones when you come to edit them.

consider your composition

How your image looks has a lot to do with composition, and it should be balanced, with all the elements in the shot working to create a harmonious photo . Your phone camera probably has a ‘rule of thirds’ grid that you can overlay your shot with to help composition, and we suggest using it.

A quick explanation of the rule of thirds grid in photography is this: The camera screen is split up into 9 squares, with three lines running vertically, and three lines running horizontally. Where those lines intersect, along one of the lines or just above one of the horizontal lines is where you want to place the items of interest in your photo, as these make the most aesthetically pleasing composition.

It may be easier to visualize if you think of a typical landscape photograph. The horizon is not often placed in the middle of the image, it is usually in the bottom third or top third. If you laid a grid across most landscape images, you’d find they normally stick to this rule. The same goes for portraits. The eyes are usually placed at or just above the top third grid lines for best composition.

edit your photos

Most images will always look better for a little adjustment after they have been taken, even if it’s just to correct exposure, color and contrast. Your phone will have a built-in editing suite, or you can use an app to help crop and adjust.

If you you want to go for professional food blog, have time and access to a computer with editing software, I’d suggest uploading your images to it and editing them on the larger screen. You can then use powerful image editing software like Photoshop, Lightroom, Luminar, GIMP or others to refine your images.

food photography videos

10 FOOD Photography TIPS (From beginner to advanced) | Behind the scene

Today I show you 10 food photography tips that you can apply whether you're a beginner or a more advanced photographer. Come with me in this new behind the scene and let's talk about food photography!

Take AMAZING food photos » 5 tips

How To Shoot FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY - Breaking Down My Process, BTS, & Final Photos!

in conclusion

Food photography is one of the hardest genres of photography to get right, but it is immensely rewarding. If you follow the guidelines mentioned above, you’ll be well on the way to creating your own food photo masterpieces. Above all, don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun!

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