Tag Archives: Lighting food

Food for Her World Vietnam magazine.
Food styling by Dang Phuong
Photography by Mads

Food for the World Vietnam magazine. Photography by Mads • on Flickr

We all love good looking food…

Food photography? So, what makes it look really good? I love to cook and make tasty food. But, great cooks also have a skill with presentation. It is the presentation which really makes great food shots too.

Food photography seems to be centred on three things – good looking food composition; great light and picking the right focus/centre of interest. Duh! Wait a minute, isn’t that pretty much photography summed up all over? OK, I jest. There are some specific ideas and techniques involved. Good food photography seems to require a particular approach.

Here are some introductory points for good food photography. You should look to achieve…

• Experience with small-sized and table-top compositions.
• A working knowledge of lighting at the table-top scale.
• Simple natural light from one source (window).
• Able to use reflectors/black cards to shape the light.
• Simple centre of interest in the shot.
• Carefully chosen depth of field.
• Very simple, but rich backgrounds.

And with the food itself…

• Natural and where possible bright colours.
• The colour mix should work together.
• Avoid odd clashes of colour.
• The food combinations should be simple and few.
• Focus on the main interest.
• Avoid highlight bokeh spots where possible.
• Try to emphasis the texture of the food (lighting).
• Use simple but eye catching cutlery and plates.
• Avoid cluttering the shot with too much food.
• Give the food a big/deep background.

More after this…

Book recommendation:

Food Photography:
From Snapshots to Great Shots
Simple advice on lighting including great diagrams. The pictures include camera settings. Excellent advice on setting up a table-top studio which was also inexpensive to do. Lots of tricks and techniques like the pros use. Great presentation ideas.

Food Photography Tips – Video

In this video we look a range of ways to look at and shoot food. It is a great introduction to food photography basics. The video uses graphic images for a broad introduction to the art of angles, framing and creating drool inducing food photos.

School of Thirds 

Damon Guy (Netkonnexion)

Damon is a writer-photographer and editor of this site. He has run some major websites, a computing department and a digital image library. He started out as a trained teacher and now runs training courses in digital photography.
See also: Editors ‘Bio’.

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