How To Shoot Food – Useful Tips For Stunning Food Photography

Cooking beautiful food – is one thing, but taking beautiful photos of it – is a whole other.
First thing in learning basics in food photografy is LIGHT! Natural light is the most important thing. It gives really nice colors and good directional hit (sidelight or backlight) to your food. If you will use an artificial light it could be too hush or give yellow or blue tone, which is bad in food photography. You can shoot outside when it is cloudy day with diffuse light, or just next to the window, what is more comfortable to photographer. If you prefer indoor shooting don’t forget that you need to have diffuse light. Here is a tip – take white bed sheet or white baking paper (parchment paper) hang it next to your window and it will soften the light. Without bed sheet or baking paper you will have a strong shadows, but with it shadows will be soft and your food will look beautiful.
Next thing about food photography that should be mentioned is ANGLES! There are two main angles you can use – top down, when you are shooting with the camera lens above the food and three quater angle. The last one is perfect to show the whole scene and different compositions. And then you can go straight to get textures in the actual stridency.
The third tip for great food shooting is STYLING. You must have different backgrounds or fabrics. It is not nessesary to buy big tablecloths – just fabrics or other materials with the size of your camera frame. And remember – always shoot the fresh food. It must be beautiful to the naked eye. If it is not fresh, or looks bad you will not have an opportunity to edit it later.

Let’s talk about CAMERA SETTINGS. Three main things in camera settings about food photography are: ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture! ISO (how sensetive is camera to light – the higher ISO – the more sensetive the camera is to light) could be a problem. Cause if it is high the picture becomes grainier. So better to keep it around 200-400 – that’s the optimal level (if you shoot with natural diffused light). With Apperture you can change how much is in focus. If you have a low apperture (small number) – it means that less will be in focus. Try to shoot in F-3.2 or 4.0 (foreground in focus and things in the background are blury). Shutter speed means how fast the camera will take the photo (the optimal in food photography is 1/100). If you’ve got a quite low light, then you can put your camera on a tripod – it will give more stability to camera, so then you can have a slower shutter speed.

Few words about EDITING. Firstable take your photos in RAW image quality. It means that photos won’t be compressed. The file size will be really big, therefore it will be much better in editing later on. Big file size and high quality make photos more truthful.