
Ten Culinary Photography Tips to Enhance Every Shot!

In recent years, food photography has experienced a resurgence of vitality.
Social media has made food photography one of the most popular forms of art; it’s no longer the exclusive domain of cookbooks and cheap restaurant menus. Cooking, and even eating, has gradually become less important, overshadowed by the act of photographing and sharing images of food.
The pandemic, with people staying at home, has made food photography even more appealing to photographers. With just a core camera kit, you can capture mouthwatering photos.
While food photography shares many similarities with still life and product photography, it also has its own subtle nuances. Regardless of the approach, a solid foundation in photography theory and technique is essential—practice makes perfect, after all! Just like preparing your favorite dish, photographing food perfectly is often more complicated than it appears.
Below, we’ve compiled ten food photography tips to help you capture your culinary creations in the best light.
1、Good lighting is essential.

The most common mistake is shooting delicious food in poor lighting. The camera sees light, not objects, no matter how tasty the object might be!
Food photography always starts with the light. Perfect light is soft, rich, and angled. You need plenty of light, but you absolutely don’t want direct sunlight hitting your scene. That’s too harsh and the contrast is too strong. The best table in a restaurant is by the window where bright daylight outside filters through the glass to softly illuminate the scene. Imagine the whole restaurant as a large box filled with useful, angled light coming through the windows to bathe the table.
This approach involves shooting with the light source entering at an angle. This provides enough contrast to highlight details within the scene and brings out colors. You don’t need to use flash to balance the light on the opposite side because you can lighten underexposed areas of the raw image during post-processing—fine-tuning raw files is often faster and more precise than adjusting in-camera.
As you change your shooting position, create varying intensities of light for the scene. The more you shoot towards the light, the more dramatic the contrast and the more theatrical the effect will be.
Alternatively, alter your shooting angle so that more light comes from behind you, and the scene will appear fuller. By controlling the shooting angle relative to the window, you also control the contrast and color—even if the light is very, very soft.
If the light isn’t adjusted properly, it doesn’t matter how delicious the food looks on the plate—poor lighting will result in a bad photo. On the other hand, in the right light, almost any setting can make the subject look appealing.
2、Edit Your Photos with Care

Processing raw files is just as important as shooting. The most natural colors are often achieved with slight adjustments to saturation, and sometimes even slightly reducing the saturation.
Under very flat lighting, to add hardness to the edges, you may need to slightly increase the contrast—adding contrast only at the black end of the histogram will help preserve tones in the rest of the scene.
Additionally, enhancing shadow details can balance the scene. If key elements are lost in the shadows, be sure to use selective adjustments to increase exposure or bring out more shadow detail.
3、Use Flash with Caution

Shooting food relying on natural light is usually feasible, but it isn’t always that natural.
Outdoor trees can cast colors across the entire scene, indoor lighting can add color casts to the room, and moving clouds throughout the day can cause dramatic changes in contrast and color temperature. Unless you bring your own lights, you will never get a nice, clean white light.
Using flash can bring consistency and help reduce post-processing work. Reliable flash provides accurate color and quantity of light from frame to frame. If what you are shooting spans several days but requires each frame to look consistent in appearance and feel, then studio flash is one way to achieve this. Besides being very practical and reliable, once you have control over your flash, you can focus on your creativity.
A reliable light source is essential, and if your light isn’t soft enough and the contrast in the scene is too high, adding an extra softbox between the food and the flash can help.
4、Single Frame Shooting

Lock the camera on a tripod, securing the focus and exposure (you need consistent focus and exposure for each scene). Make small adjustments between frames to simulate a scene in motion.
Process the raw files to the desired state before outputting individual frames. Then, bring the still images into a video editing tool and use smooth transitions to refine the motion.
5. Use a standard lens (50mm).

Using a telephoto lens to narrow the field of view presents its own challenges. Longer focal lengths, such as 100mm, compress the scene—you may lose a sense of depth, and your composition might appear flat. Longer lenses can also be problematic in confined spaces, as you may lack enough room to step back for the shot.
Starting with a 50mm lens strikes the perfect balance and improves the overall outcome.
6. Consider the scale of quantity.

When we have a lens in hand, there’s a tendency to move inward, attempting to tighten the composition by removing unwanted elements from the scene. This is a very simple approach to shooting.
The trick to building richer, more detailed content with still life and food is to step back and bring more details into the frame, rather than fewer. It’s not just a different lens, but a different perspective. When you step back a little, you find yourself photographing the table, not just the plate. Now, you can choose what to shoot again. Step back further, and you have a restaurant, not just the table. At each scale, you can find different composition options.
7. Add some small movements.

8. Create an attractive arrangement.

Creating an interesting piece of work requires a range of approaches. You can use props and styling to build the exact scene from scratch or find moments within existing scenes in the real world; the best results often come from combining both.
Styling is a specialized skill in commercial photography, where stylists provide their props and ideas, often taking the lead in conceptualizing the entire shoot.
As a photographer, working with a good stylist is a joy because they carry so much creative input. With the stylist preparing the scene, you can focus on the task of finding the ideal composition—handling both photography and styling on your own can be demanding, as your brain switches between two tasks.
9. Use props.

The key to great food styling is having props on hand to complement the scene. You can collect interesting props to add a touch of fun to your scene.
Ingredients from the recipe, pottery, and tableware can serve as props, and people can also act as props. Consider the hands in the scene or the kitchen staff holding a dish.
Using props correctly can add context to the scene, such as a teapot with a cup next to a slice of cake. Props can also be used to carefully introduce specific colors that accentuate the subject of the scene.
10. Take control of the entire scene.

What makes food photography so different from other types of photography is the level of control you have over the subject. You can do anything you want on set, and you can even eat it! Compared to shooting a full studio setup or waiting for sunrise over a landscape, controlling the light on a tabletop scene is much easier.
Food doesn’t have to pose or express an emotion; it simply sits there, quietly accepting attention, motionless. Of course, within limits—be careful with ice cream, as it may melt in minutes if you’re not ready to shoot.
The scale and lifelessness of food photography give you great opportunities for composition. It’s a wonderful genre to explore different color effects and perspectives.
Don’t feel like you need to cram all the colors of the rainbow into a single shot—instead, try starting with a limited color palette and then find ways to repeat colors within the scene.
Use more than one dish in your styling and take advantage of larger scales to show greater creativity.
Change your perspective as you shoot, try top-down angles, and look for different viewpoints.
As you change your perspective, you can also change your light angle—just like seasoning a dish with salt and pepper, altering your angle can fine-tune the feel of the shot.
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