The Art of Food Photography

Today's seminar (at the Grand Café on Duval Street) taught us about photographing food. The idea is that the photo should make your mouth water, even if it means covering dried-out meat with syrup to make it glow again, and securing delectables in just the right spot with silly-putty. Just because you want to eat your work doesn't mean you should go ahead and do it.

Photographing food isn't all that different from any still life, so there's probably a lot to learn from any photography textbook. Similarly, placing the food on plates and surrounding it to make it look great would also help with any food presentation, when you're serving food and not taking pictures of it. Except for the syrup and the silly-putty.

Someone who takes photos of food for a living might spend hours tweaking the light around the objects. Chrome utensils in the shot are pesky, because they reflect everything, including the photographer. I was surprised to learn that the best way to photograph food is to have the primary light source behind it, so as to create shadows in the front of the scene.

This picture is a kind of Escher look (or Norman Rockwell?) at the seminar. It's a photo of someone taking a photo of food, and someone else (the festival photographer) taking a photo of the person taking photos of the food and participants in the seminar. Meanwhile, we're all taking photos of them.

I looked at the equipment being used by the festival photographer -- a huge zoom lens with a hood, a reflector, a diffuser, and more. Together it was like picking up a bowling ball. I particularly liked it when a participant asked a professional about how to set his pocket digital camera manually. The photographer's answer: "Don't ask me; I have no idea how to use those cameras."