Food Photography 101

Posted by The Chubbychef on Jul 20, 2010 in Featured Articles, General Food News

I have been blogging and food photography for almost 3 years now but only recently did I really take it seriously. It was just a wasteland of my thoughts and adventures before where I could every now and then see how I have developed as well as take a look back at my online chronicles of my so-called life. Food has always been and will always be a part of my blogging experience. The best way to my heart as always would be good food. Hearty meals express comfort and home and a feeling of security. Spicy dishes as well as unknown dishes stir up feelings of being adventurous and being daring. Something as simple as a cookie or a brownie invokes feelings related to my mother and times of baking in our gazebo. See the power of food?

As time went on, my love for food translated or rather mixed and carried over with my love for photography. There was just something so magical in bringing the emotion one has attached to food, and carrying them over to photos. I started taking photos with a P&S digicam and like so many others wanted to blog about food.

This was actually one of the first food shots I’d ever taken. I’d have little knowledge about photography and light and basically just wanted to show of my cookies on the wire rack as they were cooling. I eventually got to reading on the interweb and really strove hard to understand the effects of light and what lens and all the photography jargon. I was then invited as a guest judge for Chef’s on Parade over at Ilocos. I barely knew how to edit and the concept of lighting and I was thrust into the limelight with pro-photographers from magazines and real chefs who knew what they were doing. I on the other hand were gasping for air, slowly sinking in the vast food world.

But I survived.

I knew I had to get better. I didn’t understand how to control the white balance and what-not. I was back to square one. But I knew I had the eye. I always tell people who want to learn food photography or photography in general, don’t blame your equipment. It has to come from you first. You have to know what you can and cannot do with what you have.  This is the single most important non-technical aspect of photography that one must really learn. We are all tempted to have the best gear, the fastest lenses, and yet, what your 100-200 thousand pesos worth of gear could do, my 20 thousand pesos can do as well. It learning what you can and cannot do first. From there begins the lesson.

I too took bad pictures. Yup I am proud to say I took some pretty nasty pictures and felt like I did well. The above picture is supposedly a “food bloggers” shot. There was no concept, no angle, no creativity. It just basically showed what I saw and documenting what you are eating. You see there are two ways to food blog, one is documenting what one is eating vis-a-vis the pictures such as above. And the other a real subtle art work where one is to showcase the food .  50% of food blogging is all about making your pictures enticing enough that the reader would want to actually eat there and try it out for themselves.

Something as simple as my morning breakfast of cereal and raisins with orange juice, would turn into something so iconic as to capture the mood of a lazy morning eating and sipping orange juice in the photo is part of the art of photography. Or maybe a bowl of ramen at a nearby eatery would capture the very essence of a hawker center as it was taken at a Tiong Bahru hawker center.

So my first tip for food photography 101 is, tell a story. Convey an emotion through food. I know it makes absolutely no sense or rather it’s really hard but try.

A year later my cookies have evolved and so has my photography. Let me offer another important piece of advice. It is not about the lens nor the composition. It is not about the camera nor the technique. Basic food photography is all about light. Play with light. Experiment with it. 95% of any type of photography deals with light. Know when to use ambiant and when to use your flash. Know what you are shooting and how you want it to look.

Understand the food and subject before you and know what you want to focus on. Understand how the chef wanted to present the dish and know what is important to highlight on the dish.

And basically find your passion. Find it and never let it go. That is the best piece of equipment or tool in photography one can have. Passion.

If you have a photo for food and you’d like me to critic it and basically help you improve send it to foodiemanila@gmail.com. If I get a considerable amount of submissions then I’ll repost all of your works here and basically set up a shoot for those who submitted as a sign that you guys are really interested in learning food photography.

Cheers,
The Chubbychef Carlos