Five Tips To Transform Your Food Photography

Food photography is both creative and rewarding, but it can also come with its challenges. Being able to master the techniques of food photography will increase your business in this ever expanding market. These are my top five tips if you’re looking to improve your food photography skills and create images that are visually stunning (and delicious).

Table of Contents

Invest in a Lighting Setup

One of the main challenges of food and hospitality photography is that you never know what the lighting situation will be like until you arrive at the venue. Natural lighting is always preferred but restaurants and bars tend to be dim and these situations aren’t ideal for photography. Low light situations may constrain you to use camera settings such as lower shutter speed, increased iso or a narrowed aperture, which may not always provide the best artistic choice for the image and will drastically reduce your quality. Indoor lighting often has a yellow hue which can be difficult to remove in photoshop. They may also cast shadows onto your image, creating unnecessary distractions.

A good artificial lighting set up will eliminate all of these problems. It is essential for a food photographer to bring at least one speed light to every shoot, even if you decide not to use it. I use a GODOX V1, which I mount into a stand with a large soft box. The GODOX V1 is great as it is very affordable and also cordless, so it’s easy to manoeuvre around the venue as I photograph different scenes.

Avoid Too Narrow Aperture

Another tip for great food photography is to avoid using too narrow dept of field. This is something I see all the time, and have made this mistake myself in the past as well. There are a few instances where using a narrow depth of field can create lovely intimate scenes. In most cases, you actually want as much of the dish to be in focus as possible. I often use f/9-f/11 to photograph most of my food photography images.

You can see in the photo that I took on the right, my aperture was too narrow. The focus point was somewhere in the centre of the dish so that I could get the parmesan sharp, but unfortunately this meant the pasta at the front of the dish is out of focus.

There are times when narrowing your aperture can enhance your images- but it’s all about careful selection and balance. For example, when photographing a table of food, using a narrower aperture can be great technique for helping the viewer navigate their attention to the focal point, or hero, of the photograph.

Experiment with Motion

Capturing motion in food photography can transform your images to another level. Rather than setting your plates down on a table and photographing them in a staged setting, try to create some dynamics to the scene.

Some examples would be to capture some cooking techniques such as sprinkling salt on a dish, pouring sauce over a meal or capturing a chef tossing a pan. You could also capture some dining experiences like pouring or swirling a glass of wine, dropping ice into a glass or cutting open an egg.

Make sure that you are using an appropriate shutter speed. Using a slower shutter speed can looks great, if it’s done correctly. If a slow shutter speed isn’t used correctly, it often just looks unintentional and can make the image appear amateur. Generally, a more fool proof method is to just halt motion. Depending on the moving object you’re capturing, you’ll likely need a shutter speed of 1/200. This is where having your own lighting setup can really become important, as such shutter speeds would be virtually impossible with most general restaurant lighting.

Focus on texture and details

Food is a sensory experience, and your photographs should capture that. You want your audience to feel as though they can almost bite the food through the screen.

Focus on the textures and details of the food, such as the crispness of a freshly baked loaf of bread or the gooeyness of a runny egg. Experiment with a macro lens or a narrower depth of field to capture interesting artistic perceptions of ingredients and textures of a dish. Using correction to get accurate colours of the food is also vital.

Don’t forget, our cameras don’t perceive an image the same as our eyes do. We don’t often realise that our brains subconsciously process things like shade, depth and colour casts in order to give us an accurate sense of reality. Dull lights and poor colour correction techniques can cause the food to look off coloured, and not as appealing as they were in reality. It’s important to use natural light or speed lights, as well as colour correction in light room, to bring out an accurate colour palette. Positioning the food in different orientations to the light (back, front, side) can create interesting textures, so be sure to adjust your set up as you go.