Over the last ten years, food photography has gained popularity and became a creative niche in the photography industry. It started as a way of capturing food photos for restaurant promotion and menus, and it has now evolved into a photography niche infused with design, community, and lifestyle.
What Makes a Fantastic Food Photo?
Firstly, a fantastic food photo should highlight the food’s inherent deliciousness and its best traits. The textures and colors of a dish should be showcased, not hidden, or muted. This means avoiding unappealing angles, blurry snapshots, and that unsightly yellow cast at all costs. If your stomach doesn’t grumble while editing your photos, well, you probably didn’t do it right. Here are our tips to improve your food photography niche game.
Regardless of whether you snap food for your personal cooking blog, for restaurants, for recipe cookbooks, or to secure photography customers, there is a multitude of ways to shoot unique and captivating photos of life’s simple pleasures: food!
- Shoot photos ideally under natural light. Avoid using overhead lamps or lights, or your built-in camera flash.
- Find the best light source by moving around. Don’t restrict yourself and your creativity by taking photographs only in your kitchen. Maybe the light is best in your living room in the morning, and in your bedroom in the afternoon.
- Take food photography from different angles. Like pizza, some dishes look great when shot from above, or from the side, like burgers, or from a 45-degree angle (cocktail drinks). Move the plate around and try snapping photos at different angles so you could choose your favorite shots later.
- Declutter. If that napkin, spoon, or messy background does not add aesthetic value to the scene, it detracts from the photo’s focal point. Concentrate on what is most important, but avoid zooming in too close that viewers couldn’t even tell what the dish is.