Tips on Photographing Food

Are you a food traveler? Do you feature your food excursions on a blog or in a diary? If so, taking photos of your meals and sharing them with your blog readers, friends or family is a great way to show them the foods you have enjoyed during your travels. There are a few things to keep in mind when taking pictures of food. Done the wrong way, the dish can look unappetizing and misleading. Done the right way, the dish can look so good you can taste it! Listed below are a few tips for taking great photos of food:

1. Focus: It is very important to keep every part of the food in focus and to shoot your photo at close range. You want the dish to look as realistic as possible, so if any part of the meal is out of focus, adjust the lighting and camera range until you get a good shot. If you have a digital SLR camera, and you really want to impress; turn off the automatic exposure setting on your camera and use a faster shutter speed (1/60th or 1/200th) coupled with a larger aperture (f/2 or f/2.8). Using these settings will keep the food in sharp focus while blurring the background; creating a very professional looking photograph. However, it will require you to take several test shots until you get the settings just right.


2. Angles: Because lighting often can’t be controlled in a restaurant environment, your camera angle really is the key to getting a great shot of your meal. Take several shots at different angles to test which angle gets the best photo of the dish. Often, the best angle from which to shoot a plate of food is from up above. Lift your camera about a foot directly over the dish (lens pointing at the dish), move the camera back towards your face about 4-5 inches (lens still pointing at the dish) and shoot. This may require you stand up. Make sure that you have also positioned the dish in the direction it was placed in front of you. There is a specific way the dish is to be placed on the table and a specific way it is to be viewed; this is the same position you want to use when photographing the plate.However, the one rule to remember when choosing an angle is to choose the angel that looks best to your eye (just make sure the lighting is good for a photo). If that means using an unusual angle to get the shot, do
it!

3. Lighting: Photographs are not three dimensional, but you want a photograph of your dish to appear that way. To do this, use lighting effects to show the contrasts of light and shadow in the food. If the restaurant is well lit, your camera flash should provide you with enough lighting to get a great photo. If the restaurant is dimly lit, you may need to provide a secondary source of lighting (like a candle at the table or the light from your cell phone). If you are really serious about food photography, purchase a small light or flashlight to take with you on your food journeys. If not enough lighting seems to always be an issue, consider dining before the sun has set and the lights have been dimmed.


4. Take the photo before you take a bite: Most importantly, take the photo before you start eating and disturbing the careful plating of the meal. This will produce a clean photograph that gives your readers or viewers the best idea of how the food is supposed to look when it comes out of the kitchen.

About the author:
Lauren Phillips has been a professional event photographer for 16 years and also owns the site Get a Photography Degree. She likes to write articles about everything photography.

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