Delicious Food Photography: Tips for Food Bloggers

Lately, photographing food has become a cult. Whereas food used to be salted or peppered before it was eaten, now it is photographed. Looking through the pages of some bloggers, you’ve probably noticed that even the simplest dish can look incredibly appetizing in a photograph.

Here are some tips from professional photographers to help make your food photos more appetizing and appealing. If you want to learn more about subject photography, go to Skylum’s blog page. For example, there is an interesting article there about how to photograph jewelry, which you will find useful.

Convey the atmosphere of the place

Use the frame merge plugin to convey the atmosphere of the place where you’re eating. Use all available dishes, napkins, tablecloths, and other furnishings to help evoke a visual memory linking time and place.

Become a master at combining materials and textures to create an immersive visual environment! This is a very important point, so we’ll give you a few additional recommendations:

• If you are shooting an advertisement for a particular restaurant, then you need to include elements of the design of the room in the frame as well, so that the dish is as if tied to that restaurant.
• When the shot is intended for publication on a blog, you should be guided by its overall style and content.
• If you are commissioned for advertising, sometimes you have to shoot the food as if it were not in the picture at all. You have to learn how to convey the atmosphere of the dish and the place. 

For example, you take a picture of a light spring salad. In that case, the tone of the picture should be light and spring-like. And in the fall, it’s better to take a photo with a deeper, darker tone.

Use natural light

Nothing will make your food more appealing than natural light from the window. Even the most expensive professional lighting equipment! However, direct sunlight can often be too bright. In many cases, they will hide colors, leaving glare.

But when it is not direct but comes through a diffuser (such as clouds, curtains, or drapes), the light from the window, even if it is noon, will be your good assistant in taking pictures. It will give a warm light that will illuminate the dish at its best.

The finished dish may not be the only object in the frame: use images of napkins and tablecloths in the color composition to give additional shades. Such visual filler will make the picture more pleasant for perception. For example, brown products, which are common, can be beautifully shaded by blue and magenta.

If the picture is good, but you are not happy with the light, the situation can always be corrected with a photo editor. Now not all bloggers use Photoshop, because processing photos in it takes a very long time, which is not very convenient. We suggest you try the modern photo editor Luminar Neo with a large set of AI tools for post-processing.

Don’t be afraid of the mess on the plate

Restaurants pride themselves on the precise arrangement of ingredients on the plate. Chefs strive for symmetry with enviable meticulousness, sometimes resorting to tweezers to place the garnish. Don’t be overzealous! How many of us do the same thing at home?

Let everything be natural: a few crumbs or a drop of sauce may look more appetizing than the strictest order.

Sure, it doesn’t look very natural when chocolate chip cookies are stacked vertically, but, stacking any flat food such as pancakes, pancakes, or onion rings in a slide is a great way to show texture and create visual interest.

Some food products, no matter how good they taste, just look unattractive in the picture. But the closer you get to the subject, when you can see more details, the more the appearance fades into the background, and the texture and color catch the eye. Sometimes that’s what can make you drool.

Get people involved

If you take a picture of a dish by holding it in your hands, this uncomplicated technique of having someone present it for the camera will bring a homely feel to the shot and show that the food has been prepared with love.

This approach creates a quirky atmosphere in the frame. Professionals often use a trick like this to create an intimacy of what’s going on. But of course, you shouldn’t take pictures of people eating, no matter how appetizing their mouths are.

Inspiration can come out of nowhere. When you’re eating or watching your favorite cooking magazine, pay attention to what looks appetizing and makes you stop and what pictures you’d be better off not taking. This will help you find ideas for your next shots.

Simple crockery and cutlery

Chinese china and fancy tablecloths are nice on their own, but if you use them for food photography, they will visually draw attention to themselves rather than the food.

Simple plates, classic white, will make the food the star of the shot. It may seem generous to put mountains of food on a plate, but when it comes to serving for a photo shoot, it’s best to stick to minimalism.

Recommendations for Instagram

This kind of photography has now become quite popular. What can we recommend to its fans?  The most important thing is that from a photo of a culinary dish you need to achieve not only informative but also, as we have already said today, appetizing, reality.

After all, the ultimate goal of such pictures is to make the viewer believe that the dish depicted in the picture is not only beautiful but also very tasty.

Take pictures and don’t be shy!  You’ll do great. Also, don’t forget to read an article about how to photograph jewelry on the Skylum developer’s website. It will help you develop your subject shooting skills.

Also See:

• Food Photography Tips for Bloggers – How To Click Food Pictures For Social Media With Your Smart Phone
• Food Photography Tips for Food Bloggers | Food Photography Hacks | Food Photography Secrets | Food Photography Basics
• 9 Tips To Becoming The Killer Food Photographer