In the age of social media and digital marketing, a well-executed food photoshoot can serve as a powerful tool to enhance your restaurant’s image and attract customers. However, just like any other art form, food photography comes with its fair share of challenges and common mistakes. In this blog, we will uncover the most common mistakes made by photographers.
Whether you are a foodie looking to up your Instagram game or a professional photographer seeking to improve your food styling skills, this blog is here to help you avoid these pitfalls.
Table of Contents
TogglePoor Lighting
The most common problem I see with food photography is the use of inadequate lighting. Photographing restaurants and bars can be quite challenging, as you need to be able to instantly adapt to a new environment. Natural lighting is always the best option, but this is not always available in every venue, therefore it’s important to always have a lighting set-up just in case. Artificial lighting also gives you a certain level of control that you can’t always get with natural light, and can open up a lot of interesting techniques and compositions.
If you look at the examples below, you can see that they lack a certain sharpness. This is because you may need to narrow your aperture, decrease your shutter speed and increase iso in order to achieve a correctly exposed image. However, all of these variables will affect the quality of the image. Poor lighting will constrain you to using camera settings that aren’t necessarily the best artistic choice for the image.
Indoor lighting usually has a yellow cast, which causes a dull, warm tinge to the images. Our eyes and brain have adapted to naturally filter out this cast, but our cameras have not. Of course, you can fix this in photoshop later on using white balance techniques, but it will be very time consuming and will never look as good as if you used the correct lighting to begin with. You can also notice this in the images below, that the colours just don’t quite pop as they should.


As you can see with the images below, they have been professionally photographed with a single GODOX speed light. The restaurant did not have much natural light, therefore artificial lighting was crucial. The colours are a lot more vibrant and the edges are sharper. I was able to use a fast shutter speed to capture the movement of the milk pouring and the orange slice dropping into the glass. Had I not used a flash, I would have had to use a much slower shutter speed, which would cause these items to be blurry. Of course, slow shutter speeds can be used artistically to create interesting movement shots, but this should be an artistic choice rather than a necessity.


Confusing Focal Point
Another mistake I see a lot of photographers make is having a poor choice of focal point. The subject of the image should be somewhere near the centre of the image, with nearby objects simply framing or leading your eye to the focal point. A careful decision should be made as to what the subject should be. As you can see below, the focal point of the first image is of a knife on a plate. There is some spectacular looking food in the background with vibrant colours, which you will find your eye is naturally drawn to. I would have chosen a dish on the table to focus the camera on, or perhaps one of the people holding food on their hands.
In the second image, we can see the focus point isn’t quite right again. I actually don’t mind the framing of the image, but the focus point is on the orange dish on the top right of the image. Using focus points on the side of the frame don’t work particularly well, as our eyes are naturally drawn to the centre of images, therefore I would have chosen the grey dish as my focus point.


As you can see with the images below, our eyes are immediately drawn to the subject of the image. The subject has been carefully chosen as to the be most interesting or impactful element of the shot. Everything else in the photo is designed to simply lead our eye to this objects. I try to avoid putting objects behind the subject to avoid distraction. For example, had the wine glass in the first image been behind the pasta, that would not have been ideal. Hands are a great way to lead our eye to a subject. Through evolution, our brain has adapted to naturally follow the direction of hands. As you can see with the images below, hands have been carefully places to lead our direction to the plate of pasta and glass of wine with the restaurant’s logo.


Incorrect Shutter Speed
Selecting the right shutter speed is important to create a sharp, focused image. Slower shutter speeds can be used in the right circumstances to capture movement in photos. But in the image on the bottom-right, you really need a higher shutter speed to capture the droplets of the lemon. A speed over around 1/200 would have been ideal. Again, this could have been due to lighting restrictions, which is why carrying a lighting kit is so important. As you can see with the image on the left, a higher shutter speed was able to freeze the pieces of parmesan cheese in motion. This creates a much more crisp image.
The other problem the image on the left, which relates to my previous point, is the candle in the background. This is quite distracting to the eye, and having moved the camera slightly to the left and placing the lemon to further to the right of the candle would have made the shot much more appealing to the eye. Obviously the food is also not in focus, but all these factors probably come back to the fact that photographer may not have had enough lighting and had to narrow their focal length in order to get the correct exposure.


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