Tips for taking better food photos

Tips for Taking Better Food Photos
Whether at home, in a restaurant, or in your studio, these tips will help!

Most of the food photography I do is "run and gun". Just like you, I go into restaurants, order a dish, and shoot in whatever conditions the place allows. Even when I shoot food for print, sometimes with the full cooperation of the kitchen, I can be limited by being in a crowded restaurant with bad light and an anxious chef. There's no controlling the environment or minimizing the chaos. So I've tried to perfect the run and gun method over the years and am sharing my tips and techniques here.
Every day hundreds of thousands of food images are uploaded to the web. Many of them are not so good. With the popularity of Instagram, Yelp, and others, lot's of folks like you are trying their hand at food photography. Cool! Make em' good! It doesn’t take thousands of dollars worth of equipment or tons of studio lights to take great food photos. Mostly it takes time, patience, and a little know-how. Here are some simple tips to help you start getting great food shots.

#7. Know How to Use Depth of Field

7/20/2018

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Know what depth of field (DOF) is (and isn’t). This kind of goes along with tip #3. If you want your photos to look professional, you need to know how to control foreground and background blurring (Bokeh). Adding too much blur, in other words leaving key elements out of focus, is for amateurs! Control what your images reveal to guide your viewer's eye to what you want them to see.
Check out this meatloaf photo . It's hard to know where the photographer wants us to look. The lighting is okay, but nothing is really in focus here except one little spot of red in the middle. It's a cool composition but poorly executed because the depth of field

Meatloaf. Courtesy of Yelp.

(AKA depth of focus) is off. I want to see the front of this meatloaf. It's got great texture and flecks of color but it's blurred out. This is probably the second most frequent mistake I see with white balance problems (Tip#5) being the first. Depth of field is an important artistic decision. Learn how to use it! That means learn to use your aperture settings!

Depth of field matters in food photography

It would have been easy to blur out part of this dish including the food at the back of the plate if the settings weren't right. Everything on this plate matters and needs to be in focus to tell the whole story of the dish.

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Chip Weiner is a Tampa food blogger and an award winning freelance photographer specializing in portraiture, food photography and photojournalism . He has been a photography instructor for over 10 years and teaches Tampa photography classes throughout the year. Have a suggestion for a food event or restaurant? Contact him here

For information on photography classes and workshops, feel free to call me or look under the Tampa Photography Classes section of my website. Photo 101 is by far the most popular! I also give private individual lessons on camera operation and making better photographs and would love to work with you one on one to make you a better photographer. Photography instruction gift certificates are also available. They make great gifts for the photo enthusiast in your life. Let's talk about what you need! 813-786-7780. See you in class!

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