food photography for bloggers
Vegan Yum Yum has an easily digestible guide to the basics of food photography. A few tips I’d add, based on my own limited personal experience:
- If you’ve got a good old fashioned 9 to 5 (more like 10 to 6 in New York) job, good luck finding a time slot that lets you shoot in natural daylight. Opt to make your most photogenic meals on the weekends. Or suck it up and get a bounceable flash.
- Sometimes, I underdress things a little for photos. While I normally like to add lots of grated cheese to pasta, chili, etc., it doesn’t look as nice when there is a blizzard of Parmigiano Reggiano covering, say, a beautiful red tomato sauce.
- Watch out for steam. If you’re taking a photo of hot food (especially if it’s still cooking on the stove), have an assistant (ahem, friend/roommate) blow some of the steam away while you photograph, so that you don’t end up with a lens (and photo) full of condensation.
- Be careful with green stuff. I read here that “The human eye is particularly sensitive to shades of green because there are so many variations in nature. Lettuce can easily appear too minty or a jarring lime green.” Keep that in mind when you’re doing any post-production editing.
