Food photography tips

These food photography tips will help you take mouthwatering photos of food for your own website. After all if you are sharing a recipe you want to make the finished dish look as appetising as possible don't you?

Photographing food for advertisements, packaging or magazine use is beyond the scale of the information I will provide here, these tips are meant for the amateur or beginner digital photographer.

Most food is three dimensional and a good photograph will give an impression of that 3D form, whether it be a sphere like the tomatoes in the photos below, or an irregular shape like the slice of cake further down the page. Food can also be shiny, smooth or highly textured and it is important to emphasize this in your food photography.

Tips like spraying with a light mist of water can come in useful but let's start with the basics.

Please note I haven't concentrated on the backgrounds particularly in these shots, they are purely an exercise in lighting at this stage. All photos on this page were taken with the camera supported on a tripod.

Food photography tips - show the shape

Tomatoes are almost spherical so we will use them for our first food photo session.

food-photography-lit-above (15K) Lighting is important in food photography, using the on-camera flash just doesn't cut it! So turn your flash off and find a lamp. This doesn't need to be an expensive studio light system; I used a daylight lamp designed for needleworkers.

For this first photograph I positioned the lamp over the tomatoes and picked an aperture of f3.5 and a shutter speed of 1/125sec. I set the film speed to ISO 200 to gain a little extra speed. If these numbers mean nothing to you pop over to the shutter speed and aperture page for more information.

The overhead light has caused harsh shadows underneath the tomatoes and highlit areas on the top. But the tomatoes themselves do not really look three dimensional do they? They are a bit flat; the same colour red throughout.

Let's try again.

food-photography-side-lit (16K) Moving the light to the left hand side and bringing it down a little lower helps to reduce those ugly shadows under the tomatoes.

We are also beginning to get a sense of roundness in the tomatoes now. The exposure was set to f4 at 1/160sec (smaller aperture, faster shutter speed, let in less light, but because the lamp was closer to the subject the picture is brighter).

food-photography-rear-side-lit (16K)
For this third shot I moved the light further back and brought it lower still. This has served to give a better shape to the tomatoes throwing the side away from the light source into shadow.

To prevent the shadows being too dark I positioned a hand mirror opposite the lamp to re-direct some of the light back into the picture.

Because the light is glancing off the side of the tomatoes it gives them a slight translucency, showing some of the internal structure.

Can you see how we improved that first, flat shot into a picture where you could almost pick up the tomatoes from the screen?

Food photography tips - show the texture

The tomatoes I used for the shots above had a smooth, slightly matt surface. I wanted something with a rougher texture for the next series of food photographs so I baked a cake!

food-photography-cake-01 (15K) I started by using the same set up as for the second photo above, with the light behind and mid-height.

The cut surface of the cake received little direct light and hence showed little texture.

The light has caught the top left corner of the cake creating a rim lighting effect which has potential, however.

food-photography-cake-02 (15K) For the next shot I moved the light source lower and turned the cake slightly to expose more of the cut surface to the light.

We are getting there, with slightly more texture visible and the rim lighting effect more pronounced against the darker background area.

With the light being lower, the rim of the plate is also more apparent.

food-photography-cake-03 (18K) Finally I brought the light slightly further forward, enabling it to glance off the cut surface of the cake and show the fluffy texture nicely.

This created a darker shadow behind the cake, which I lightened by positioning a hand mirror opposite the lamp.

Much better! Quite appetising in fact.

Sorry, I couldn't take any further shots of this subject, as I ate the cake (in case any of my friends see this, don't worry it was gluten free).

Now its your turn

Didn't think you were going to get away without sharing your shots did you?

Have you taken mouthwatering photos of food?

Why not get our taste buds going by sharing your food shots? Did you manage to empahsize the texture and shape of the foods you photographed? Tell us how you set up the shot, what lighting you used, any tips you would like to pass on.

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