Food Photography Basics

I’m by no means an expert food photographer. However, I often get asked about how I take the pictures for my blog. I think I have something to offer someone new to food photography because I only recently learned the basics myself. I remember what it’s like to be confused and frustrated by bad photos. I started this blog in November 2007, and at first, I had no idea how to take decent photos of food. I did some basic web research and some asking around, and I always got the same advice:

1. Use natural light
2. Don’t use flash
3. Use the macro setting on your camera

Flipping my camera to the macro setting was easy enough, and I could see that my camera’s flash made my pictures unevenly lit – the back of the picture was dark and the front was blown out. But when I turned the flash off, my pictures ended up blurry and yellow. And I didn’t understand what everyone meant by “natural light.” (Um…it means light from nature. I’m an idiot sometimes.)

a very yellow photo taken under fluorescent light

I floundered for a month or two until I came across Ellie’s series on food photography for point-and-shoot cameras. If you don’t find what you’re looking for here, or you just want more information, check out Ellie’s posts. They were a great place for me to start learning about photography.

Food photography almost all comes down to lighting. Food styling and composition are nice too, but if your lighting sucks, your photo will suck. The good thing is that there’s really not much to know about lighting to start taking good photos.  Here’s an example of a photo with composition I like, but the bad lighting made it salvageable only after lots of editing.  And it still isn’t that great.

1. Natural light

Not all light is white. Evening light and early morning light have a blue tinge (at least where I live). Tungsten and fluorescent light bulbs have a yellow-orange cast. Even though we don’t necessarily perceive these overtones, your camera will definitely record it. You need the whitest light possible for food photography.

clockwise from upper left – sunrise; early afternoon; sunset; fluorescent

Sunlight during the middle of the day is whitest. That’s tricky for most of us, who work during the day and eat dinner at night, especially during the winter months when it might be dark before we even get home from work. There’s no easy and cheap way to deal with this. I often photograph leftovers when the light is better, and of course you’ll have more freedom on weekends. You have a little more freedom with baked goods too. You could also buy or build a lightbox.

While sunlight is best, you don’t want to take photographs in a sunbeam, which will introduce harsh shadows.

2. White balance

Of course you can’t always take your pictures at that perfect “whitest light” time. That’s okay, because your camera can make some adjustments to the color of the light. It has settings for tungsten light bulbs, cloudy days, bright daylight, etc. You’ll need to check your manual to find out exactly how to change the setting, but it’s generally pretty easy. You’ll have a bunch of options, and it’ll take some playing around to see what works the best for your camera. On my Nikon point-and-shoot (P&S), the custom white balance was always best. (You take a picture of something white and tell your camera that that’s what white is, and it adjusts everything accordingly.) My Canon dSLR tends to make everything too yellow when I use the custom option, but the automatic selection is always blueish, so generally one of the other options is the best choice. Neither of my cameras do a good job correcting light from tungsten light bulbs though – the color of that light is just too far from white.

3. Exposure compensation

This is a great feature that I’m pretty sure every camera has. It basically lets you set how bright your photo is, or how much light you let in. People tend to like food photos on the overexposed side. The scale generally goes from -2 to 2, with 0 being the default. On my P&S, I set it around 0.3 to 1.0 for food photos. On my dSLR, I usually use 0.7 to 1.3. But definitely try playing with it – it’s a really easy adjustment to make, and it makes a huge difference.

clockwise from upper left: -1.0; 0.0; +1.0; +1.7

4. Flash/Tripods

In general, on-camera flashes and food photography don’t mix – as I said above, your photo will be dark toward the back and overexposed so details are lost toward front of the photo. The major problem I had with turning the flash off was that my camera then needed a slow shutter speed to make a bright enough picture. I just couldn’t hold the camera still for as long as the shutter was open, and the result was blurry pictures. So I bought a cheap countertop tripod at Target, and I pretty much never used my P&S without the tripod again. It was the only way I could get clear photos without the flash.

left – flash; right – no flash

5. ISO setting

My P&S doesn’t have the option to change the ISO setting, but I’m guessing most cameras do. If yours does, this is another setting that can help you control the lighting. Your camera is more sensitive to light at higher ISO settings, so you can get away with faster shutter speeds while still getting nicely lit photos. The problem is that using high ISO values can introduce graininess and color errors into your pictures. If you’re just going to post the pictures on the internet on your blog, you can probably get away with a higher ISO setting than if you plan to print out a large-size print of a photo. I often use ISO 800 to get clear pictures without a tripod, and I’ve rarely noticed problems when the photos are posted on my blog.

left – ISO 100; right – ISO 1600

You probably can’t see the graininess at this size, but if you click on the photo with ISO 1600, it’ll enlarge and you can see the problem, especially in the shadows.

6. The macro setting

Every time someone asks how to take good photos of food, everyone chimes in that they should use their macro setting, but this isn’t a piece of advice I always agree with. The macro setting lets you get in closer to your subject, but sometimes people tend to get too close to the food, so you don’t get a good idea of scale or what the overall dish looks like. (I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, I admit. ) Besides, on my P&S, I wasn’t able to use the macro setting while adjusting the white balance and exposure compensation. This is something else you’ll want to experiment with.

7. Focus

On the other hand, long after I got my dSLR and stopped using my P&S, I realized a great use for the macro setting – a shorter depth of field.

left – long depth of field; right – short depth of field

People tend to love short depth of field in food photos. I certainly do. However, my P&S had no options for me to adjust the focus. The camera really wanted everything in the picture to be in focus. (This was a big reason for my desire for a dSLR.) But when I use the macro setting, it doesn’t have a choice. The lens is set to take a picture of something close up, so it’ll put whatever is closest in focus, but it just can’t get the farther stuff in focus too. That must be how I got this shot, although I didn’t know it at the time.

left – macro setting; right – automatic setting

8. Photo editing

I do some editing on every single picture I take. I haven’t coughed up the money for any of the Photoshop programs, but I did download the GIMP, which I highly recommend. It’s completely free. I’ve never used Photoshop, so I can’t make a direct comparison, but I’ve been able to do every single thing I’ve needed to with the GIMP. I pick up new features here and there through the Pioneer Woman, who uses Photoshop, but the GIMP is set up in a similar format.

I generally edit the white balance and exposure, as well as do some cropping, resizing, enhancing colors, and sharpening. I try not to do much more than that for food photos. Learn how to use the curves option! There are some good tutorials on the internet if you google “photoshop curves.” I would need a whole other post to go into each of these options.

left – before editing; right – after editing

9. The studio

I’ve lived in apartments with galley-style kitchens and limited counter space for years. I’m fortunate that my current apartment has a window in the kitchen, next to one of the counters. This is generally where I take my photos.

Because my P&S was inclined to put every single thing in the frame in focus, my shots often had distracting background crap in them. That’s one reason I used to take such close-ups of my food – if the frame was entirely filled with food, it didn’t have the corner of the microwave or my entire living room in the picture as well. Plus, my counters are ugly, and I don’t want their brown drabness in my photos.

I’ve found that a basic white display board ($3 at Target) solves the problem much more elegantly. After the first board eventually got dirty, I bought a new one and recruited the old one to stand up facing the window on the opposite side of my “studio”, which was great for evening out the light in my pictures.

Sometimes I’m too lazy to set up all of this, and for those times, I can often get away by using my stove.

10. Equipment

I started out using a Nikon Coolpix 2500, which my parents gave me when they upgraded to a camera with more options. This is a very basic point-and-shoot. The options that I’ve gone through here (with the exception of ISO) are all that I was able to adjust, and as I said, I had no control over the focus at all. Still, I’m pretty happy with some of the food photos I took with it.

I was not happy, however, with the non-food photos that I took with it. Using a tripod isn’t practical when I’m trying to take pictures of my nephew playing inside a house, and anyway, he moves, so the photos end up blurry even with the tripod. Plus, the delay between pushing the shutter button and the photo being taken meant that my nephew was on top of me by the time my camera took a picture, when I wanted a photo of him running toward me. And, I once took what I think would be a great picture of my grandmother holding my other nephew, except that my sister’s living room demands just as much attention as my grandmother does in the photo. I’m not saying that this is a terrible picture – but I wanted something more than the average snapshot.

And so I started researching dSLRs. What I found was that every single one under $1000 had wonderful reviews. As a result, I decided that I might as well just choose the cheapest one, and that is how I ended up with the Canon Rebel XT. I’ve had it since May 2008, and I love it.

I also got the cheapest lens possible. The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens is known for being fast and for taking clear photos, which is exactly what I wanted. It has some limitations – mostly the lack of a zoom, which can be frustrating. However, it’s certainly worth what it costs.

And, most recently, I got an external flash. No more worrying about taking photos at night for me.

Update: Since I first wrote this, I have acquired Photoshop CS4.  But I haven’t used it for any photos on my blog yet (as of February 2009).

If you have other questions or find that any of this information is unclear (or incorrect), please don’t hesitate to leave me a comment or send me an email at crumblycookie.bridget at gmail dot com.