Food photography is critical when you are a food blogger and as a food blogger and home cook, I understand how important it is to make the healthy, homemade food I cook look good. After all, as the saying goes, we eat with our eyes. However, as a beginner photographer, I also know how difficult it is to achieve and succeed at portraying your food in a positive light through the eye of your lens. It is, after all, the only way to persuade you to try out my food.
I truly adore the art of food photography: the sound of the shutter; the revelation of image after the shoot; the styling (well, sort of styling) of the food; playing with the light and angles. It’s magical.
I’m working hard to improve my healthy food photography, and even though it has been a few years since I picked up my camera, I feel as though I have improved. The penny has dropped since last time and I want to understand more to the point where I have solved the puzzle that is food photography.
The images above all have slightly different settings because I have shot them in manual: the holy grail of food photography! I have adjusted the aperture, the shutter speed and the ISO to try and capture that perfect picture. Which one do you prefer? Image 1,2 or 3?
Image 2 is my favourite. The aperture (f-stop is the other term) is set to 3.2 which in simple terms means the lens is partially closed and so lets in less light than if the aperture (f-stop) was a 1.8 or 2.2. What is interesting is that despite the aperture being higher (lens more closed) the image is brighter than image 1 which had an aperture of 2.0 (lens more open) It’s these technical details that hook me into food photography, and photography in general.
This image serves as a good illustration to help you understand aperture.
The other interesting point, is how blurred the fork is in all the images. Once again, the aperture affects this. A low f-stop will create a more fuzzy/blurred image, so your object in the centre will be in focus but everything else will be out of focus. As you can see from image 2, my risotto is in focus, but as the lens didn’t pick up the fork and because the f-stop being 3.2, the fork is blurred. This is known as the depth of field. The lower the f-stop, the more the items in the background will be out of focus.
There is no way that one solitary blog post could explain the intricacies of photography. There is also no way that I could possibly, as a beginner, explain it either. But just by looking at the 3 images above, you will almost certainly have an opinion about them. It might be to do with the angle of the photography, the fact that it is a very close up shot, or that you think the image is too dark or too bright. In truth, it doesn’t really matter about these photographs. I’m simply experimenting and trying to understand how to make the camera to operate in manual successfully.
In essence, I want my food photography to make you want to eat my recipes. Do they? At this early stage of the game, I presume they don’t. Looking back at some of my earlier photography, I wouldn’t want to eat the food either! My images were so gloomy without any POP!
However, I’m learning and to me that is all that matters. Each week that I take a ride on the social media/blogging rollercoaster, I take away so much that would never-ever have happened if I hadn’t tried.
And I think that is the message I’m trying hard to get across in all my work. We have a motto in our house: ‘We’re going to find out’ My husband says this to me when we are about to do something new. He says, ‘I’m not sure what will happen, but we’re going to find out!’
If you’re thinking about trying something new: Do it. You will learn and you will definitely find out if it is the thing for you!
Have a great week and please keep popping back to check on my progress. If you really like what I am saying then put your email address into my form and hit subscribe.
Thanks for reading,
Laura xx
