Food is a fundamental part of survival. The very first thing we do after being born is eat. Human brains know food on a primal and instinctual level. Our brains automatically reject or call into question food imagery that doesn't look real. In advertising, our brains are a little more forgiving.
Food photography is a bit of a dark art. In this video, I go behind the scenes on a test shoot with a food stylist at my food photography studio in the UK. Looking at the styling, lighting, and process that creates a day's work.
Want to know a secret? You know those images that look like they’re all natural light? Well, lots of the images are produced using some sort of flash or second light source. The flash isn’t used to replace the natural light, but rather to complement the natural light and fill in where that natural light just can’t pull its weight.
Have you ever gone out to a restaurant and seen a chef slaving away in the back for hour after hour, producing one delicious dish after another, and asked yourself, “Do they even enjoy cooking once they get home?” Well the answer to that is “Yes!” and photographer Ben Sassani takes viewers behind the scenes (and refrigerator doors) of some of the top chefs around with his personal project Shoot My Chef.
Keen to keep herself busy during lockdown, photographer Erin Sullivan began working on a new series, which involves using everybody objects, usually food, to create photos that give off the illusion they’re of huge landscapes. The series includes watermelon, broccoli, and onions, which are angled to look like mountains, caves, and hot springs.
An important part of growing as a photographer is shooting personal projects. If you are a food photographer, it can be extremely easy to get stuck in a rut because you are shooting the same modern images over and over. An easy and important way to combat this is to shoot food as fine art.
Jahla Seppanen of The Manual, which touts itself as “The Essential Guide for Men,” recently published an interview with Elliot Clarke aka the “Apartment Bartender” with tips and tricks for taking great cocktail photos for one’s Instagram feed. Although the interview is aimed at casual photographers, there are a few useful nuggets of info for anyone wanting to improve their product or cocktail photography.
Getting into any genre of photography can be both daunting and expensive. Knowing what to buy, how to prioritize your spending, and in which order to procure the new camera kit can be very time-consuming. Hopefully, this will help.
Choosing the right lighting modifier can seem like an endlessly daunting task. In this video, I break down my thought process and show examples of how I use different modifiers for varying types of images as well as explaining the key differences in my equipment.
One of the things that can drive someone new to food photography mad is capturing steam or smoke. It doesn't have to be complicated. And it is easy to do without any special equipment to create the steam or smoke.
Every now and then a video seems to explode over YouTube. More recently this has been the food styling hacks tutorials. Here are some myth busting facts.
Food photography is something you can practice at home right now, and maybe this video will be the inspiration you need to get started.
A couple of years ago I was tasked with getting a shot of grape stomping for a local food magazine, Edible Ozarkansas, who were doing a story on the history of local wine production in Arkansas. Right away, images of Lucy and Ethel of "I Love Lucy" stomping grapes in the giant barrel came scrolling through my mind. Challenge accepted.
Needless to say, there's a fair few logistical complexities when photographing ice cream. After shooting for a vegan ice cream brand for a couple of years now, here are my best tips for running a smooth shoot when you’re capturing ice cream.
Saint Patrick's Day celebrations in the United Stated revolve around one thing: lots of green booze. In working with a recipe developer for a St. Patrick's Day beverage, we both wanted to steer clear of the common green beer and food coloring based cocktails. The result was a beautiful green sangria. Here is more on how I created this subtly St. Patrick's Day themed shot.
It’s one thing to plan a restaurant shoot or a client brief for a particular project, but how do you go about planning and photographing a much longer project, like a cookbook? In this post, I’m sharing my tips on how to photograph a self-published cookbook, but the advice holds true for a longer project like an e-book too.
Fstoppers Original: Lee Morris Shoots Oak Steakhouse from FStoppers on Vimeo.
To celebrate the holidays and all the delicious meals that are being prepared around the world, we invite you to share your best looking food images for our next episode of "Critique the Community." We will be critiquing the pictures from a commercial standpoint so submit the pictures that you think sells the food itself. Please get in your submissions by the end of Wednesday, December 2, and you'll have the chance to have your image critiqued by the Fstoppers team. For this episode, we will be giving feedback to 20 pictures. To qualify, you must follow the submission rules below.
Food is a part of our everyday lives and yet something a lot of people take for granted. How often do you stop and look at food, noticing how produce changes throughout the seasons? Not many of us do, unless you are a food photographer or have a chef in the family. Artists Caitlin Levin and Henry Hargreaves got up close and personal on their most recent collaboration, "Food Scans," cutting up produce to reveal its patterns and scanning them to create beautiful, intricate imagery.
Are you a food photographer or enthusiast looking for a friendly online community to edit, post, and share your food photographs? A newly launched app Foodim offers you to escape the politicization of Instagram and Facebook, and focus on what's important to you: food.
Lately, I have been watching more food recipe videos. Some of them are well made and others are kind of boring and flat. What can you do to make sure your videos are not the latter?
There are so many trade secrets in photography, but when I moved into food and drink, I found it almost impossible to get any real info on how to do anything of use.
It's headed toward Christmas and the vibe on instagram has certainly changed. In this video, I go over how to edit dark and moody photographs.
Good photography is much less about the gear you don’t have and much more about using the gear you do have.
Food and product photography backgrounds can be incredibly difficult to come by in certain parts of the world. There are lots of tutorials out there about how to create your own textured backgrounds and wood backgrounds. But vinyl backgrounds are the bomb when it comes to portability and saving space. Creating them isn’t too difficult either.
With gear paralysis definitely being a thing when starting out in food photography, it can result in a lot of frustrating trial and error when equipping your new home studio. This guide is definitely useful.
There is a lot of questionable information and hacks pertaining to photography on the internet. No genre is as notorious as food photography, where some people suggest pouring motor oil on pancakes and using PVA glue instead of cheese. However, some of these practices are literally illegal. Read on to find out why.
While I personally enjoy eating my food, there are times where that food is worth a photo as much as a bite. That said, if it’s a field you are looking to get into, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
There are lots of great options from pre-made to digitally printed backdrops available, but a lot of them are not cheap, and if you want to have a wide variety, it adds up quickly. That is why I supplement my collection with my own homemade DIY backdrops.
You’ve been commissioned to photograph new images for a restaurant, but there’s a lot of spinning plates and moving parts. In this article, I share my essential steps for preparing for and running a photoshoot at a restaurant.
Have you ever wondered how you could recreate the amazing flying food slow motion videos that seem to be trending lately? If you have, you probably have an idea how to do it, but lack all the fancy gear and equipment the pros are using in those commercials.
Making food look amazing on set is as much the job of the food stylist as it is the photographer and retouchers. Here are the tools that a food stylists uses to get the job done.
In this video, I go behind the scenes on a shoot, showing how I travel with camera gear before heading back to the studio to go over some pro tips for traveling and shooting on location.
Jif, the popular American peanut butter company, launched a new campaign last week with the popular site GIPHY to settle the GIF pronunciation debate once and for all and in doing so, claims they "finally put a lid on the #jifvsgif debate." Available with several fun messages printed about, a limited 40-oz. jar labeled "Jif" on one side and "Gif" on the other is also now available from Amazon while supplies last.
Identifying trends in commercial photography is important. It helps you develop your practice and keeps you on your toes! One of those trends right now is hard light. Hit that subject hard, cast some shadows, and make it look like we're all shooting poolside, sipping piña coladas!
I am not a food photographer and never will be, but I still enjoyed giving myself the challenge to shoot what I had left of my lockdown food shop. Whatever type of photography you specialize in, shooting food can be a fun way to put your own unique spin on it.
In my last Fstoppers post, I shared an interesting video called Briefly, which discussed how and why a company or advertising agency might approach developing or executing a creative brief.
Remember, the brief is the information that you receive going into an assignment and client relationship. It can serve as your guide to understand what your client aspires to accomplish; a jumping off point to get your own mind working to produce concepts and content ideas. Some briefs are short; some briefs are lengthy and detailed. Some are open for interpretation; others seem rigid and strict.
The landscape of all businesses looks different, and store after store keeps closing because of online businesses. The type of business we see consistently is the dining establishment, and their need for content is immense.
Adding special effects to shots can turn a nice but rather plain image into something truly memorable. In this video, what behind-the-scenes as a commercial is made for a brand of flash-frozen coffee using dry ice.
Last month I asked readers to share their experiences of working for Kodakit. The responses have been mostly positive but with a few caveats. You can expect to shoot (and eat) a lot of food, but is it worthwhile?
Food photography, like every other genre, has certain pitfalls that can adversely affect your ability to make a good income from it. This excellent video tutorial features an experienced food photographer discussing three common pricing mistakes and how to fix or avoid them.
With a bewildering array of tripods available, it can be a challenge as a new photographer to figure out what sort of tripod will best suit your work, a choice that’s made all the more stressful when you realize just how expensive tripods can be. This in-depth guide will definitely help.
I recently shot some cooking tutorials. They were budget-friendly, easy to follow, and there were 50 of them. Here’s how we did it.
I ate it. I ate it with my partner and made soup out of it the next day. Damn, I hate spoilers. Nevertheless here’s the full lowdown on how to orchestrate a simple food shoot when you’re technically meant to be cooking dinner in a pokey kitchen.
