How To: Photograph Food
Whether you are filming your first food documentary or trying to step up your Instagram game, food photography can be very difficult to get right. Many times, you only have one chance to get the shot depending on temperature and timeframe.
What you will need
· Food (Hopefully you have many backups of the same subject)
· Large window or natural light source
· Some type of diffusion material; a bedsheet, shower curtain, laundry sheets, etc.
· A white material for bouncing light; white piece of paper, use of walls, t shirt, etc.
· A dark material for cutting light; black piece of paper, dark cloth, book, etc.
· Textured materials: Wooden table, table clothes, napkins, etc.
· Color contrast: Complimentary or contrasting colors that will make your subject pop!
· INSPIRATION!
Let’s Do This!
1. First step is to pick the dish or item you wish to photograph. You will want to take note of every color on this dish, every texture, and anything else this dish will involve such as steam, smoke, melty gooey, etc. Once you pick your subject, you will want to find something similar in color to put in your frame as you set up your lighting.
Pro Tip: If the dish is extremely hot or heat involved, keep a torch or some type of heat source right off frame to add some quick reheating if needed.
2. Locate a large window or bank of windows that has a nice natural light source of daylight pouring in. Natural light will keep the color palate of the dish consistent and true to form. Any sort of tungsten lights can add a yellow/orange color cast if not balanced properly.
Hopefully this huge source of light will be soft daylight meaning the sun is not blaring in directly. Best case scenario you want a nice cloudy day or the sun just rising or setting. If this soft daylight is not available, we need to add diffusion to that light in the form of a bed sheet, shower curtain, or something similar. This will spread out the light evenly giving nice subtle shadows instead of harsh lines.
3. Once we have our soft daylight, we will want to bounce that light around to create some beautiful light on our subject on various sides. If we use the daylight to hit the back of our dish (which is recommended), we will back to put a reflective material to the front of the dish to bring out more of the details. In a tough bind, ask someone with a white t shirt to stand in front of your food or right off camera. This will lift the overall exposure of our food giving a nice soft dreamy commercial type quality.
4. Next, we will want to add some shadows to our subject. Adding contrast will add emotion, mood, and depth to our food. While we want that “well-lit” dreamy feel, we also want to add depth to show size and form. This can be achieved by placing a dark object right off frame usually directly left or right of the subject. Be careful not to cut too much of your natural daylight, but just enough to shape your food.
5. Now that your food looks breathtaking, we want to add some textures. Adding nice napkins or table clothes will let us feel connected to the people and place where the food is coming from. This adds that “people” element to our food which is the subtext of our photography. This can also be achieved by using things that relate to our subject…say if your shooting an apple, you may want to have some leaves or a knife in your photo. Something that connects our viewer to the story of our image.
Adding some other colors in the image will also help our subject pop…you may want to go to your local arts & craft store and buy some different colored paper (oranges, yellows, pinks, work great!)
6. Now that our scene is set…we want to bring in our star and really let the subject shine. The composition of the photo must draw the viewers eye directly towards want you want them to look at. Your inspiration will help you bring your food photography to life…it really takes sitting down and thinking about every angle of the image as well as the food itself.
Now you’re ready to go off on your own and take amazing food photography! Please send me your pictures!
-FFC-C
Awesome directions. I love photography, but have not done much food photography, but now I feel like I might be able to take it on! On little glitch in number 3 "we will back to put a reflective material to the front" I'm missing some word or something here--or I am just reading it wrong, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
ReplyDeleteThere are some tidbits here that I’ve never thought of! I struggle with photographing food, because it always ends up looking messy or shiny/slimy somehow. I think the lighting is a big part of that.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of writing, I appreciate the conversational tone, though some sentences could be slimmed down. For example:
“If we use the daylight to hit the back of our dish (which is recommended)...”
vs.
“I recommend casting daylight from behind the dish...”
Off I go to photograph my tacos tonight :)
I really enjoyed this article because, lets face it, food does in fact eat first! I always try to take cool, artsy photos of my food yet I never seem to get the right angle - but your list really informative and helpful!
ReplyDeleteOne suggestion I will make in regards to look is to capitalize every word in the What Will You Need heading. This will make it match the rest of your headings and make it stand out more.
Under this list, you put a lot of great things and list items to help the reader understand. However, I would make sure you use all the same punctuation throughout to make sure it flows. For instance, in bullet points three, four and five you use a semi-colon to separate the item and examples but in bullet points six and seven you use a colon. I would just make sure that throughout your posts you are staying consistent.
Overall this was a really well-thought blog post. I do agree with RM in that you can make it a little more personal with your recommendations and thoughts!
- Delta Sky
DeleteI like this a lot. You used photos, but you didn’t cheat—you didn’t rely on them. You direct us through the process with words. Nothing here is a suggestion. It’s clear you have your research and experience behind you and we should follow your lead.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I wouldn’t expect any less from a filmmaker.
The devil’s advocate assignment encouraged you to experiment, draft, and discover new thoughts and ideas. You used yours to find a need within your mashup of food and film. How do we restore public experiences?
I don’t ask you to write a set of instructions solving that problem because that would be too much work for one or two weeks. Instead, I asked you to create instructions for a simpler task like photographing food. It’s practice for inserting more clarity and logic into all of your writing.
Ideas aren’t useful if you can’t apply them to reality. Even a novel or film needs its internal logic. Writing a set of instructions is a form of “application.” If you can write out a logical method for realizing an idea—that others can easily follow—then you’ve successfully “applied” it to reality.
A set of instructions also shares your thought process with your readers. It’s another example of clarity in good writing, which we spoke about at the beginning of the semester.
Look at how a simple, numbered, step-by-step approach improved everyone’s sentences and structure in this module. There’s much less clutter and much less hesitation in this type of writing because steps take action.
Restoring public experiences is a more complicated question, which would require a more complicated set of instructions. Once you come up with a better idea, and can explain and share it, then you have to convince your audience it's a better way too.
Good writing instructs the reader how to follow your train of thought to your conclusions. If you think of everything you write as a set of instructions, it reminds you to remember the readers’ needs.
Consider your classmate, @LynnDeming. She’s wants us to think about health and exercise in a different way—as play. And @DottyStripes? She, like many people in her industry, want to come up with a better car. And @JohnnyBrady? He wants to share his life experience to amuse, entertain, and inspire us.
Those are all forms of instruction too. Even Johnny has to work on his delivery, clarity, and logic in addition to his storytelling. It’s also part of comedy, and fiction, and journalism too.
Think about how hard it is to get you to change your exercise habits, or buy into a new technology, or read a new book. Changing the audience’s mind and behavior is intimidating—a big challenge to writing.
Yet also look at how much work you’ve produced in this short time span. Little by little, writing builds in response to missions of any size, especially when you think in drafts.
Screenwriting followed by production taught me this more than anything else.
This tension, between the devil’s advocate and the real world, is the tension between your imagination and your internal editor—or your real editor! Good writing is an equal partnership between the two.
When you think and write with both minds, it's a tremendous asset.
Well done, Fran.