foodphotography

The pandemic has truly hurt the creative industry. Who knew that a year ago that specializing in portrait photography would hurt my career so badly?

We were several weeks into the lockdown. My optimistic attitude told me that it was the perfect time to write a book. Commercial shoots canceled, personal engagements canceled, nothing but time at home for the foreseeable future. How hard could it be?

Sarah Crawford is an accomplished baker and food photographer most well known for her blog Broma Bakery and in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom has shared her tips for getting the most out your photos of holiday baked goods.

British electronics retailer Currys has published a comprehensive breakdown of insights it collected on the state of photography in 2020 using various statistical methods and sought input from three experts to forecast the troubled photography industry going forward.

In this 35-minute video, I go through my entire process of shooting for my commercial portfolio. During the COVID-19 lockdown, I have had more time to focus on my book, which will hopefully help get me back out there when everything opens up again.

Food photographer Joanie Simon of The Bite Shot has put together a helpful tutorial that shows you how to capture "dramatic food photography" using an extremely cheap DSLR. Specifically, she picked up a used Canon Rebel T2i with a kit lens for just $200.

Taking a look at popular images featuring food on Instagram, you'll see a pattern. Andrew Scrivani, a New York food photographer veteran puts it bluntly: "They are almost exclusively shooting from the top. Almost everything is a round dish of food and in a square, because Instagram is square, and a lot of it is on white or very light backgrounds, and white or very light plating, and consistently less and less propping."

Those "food styling hacks" videos that go viral online every few months might not be entirely truthful—in fact, they're often entirely misleading. Which is why professional food photographer Scott Choucino put together this video reacting to/debunking some of the most common hacks he's seen online.

Photographer Taylor Jackson has started a new series on his YouTube channel called Photography Challenge, where he will (you guessed it) take on a different challenge every episode. And this week, he's been challenged to turn a $3 frozen TV dinner into professional food photography worthy of a 5-star restaurant.

Want to learn how to create a "flying food" photo without actually making food travel through the air? Food photographer Skyler Burt of We Eat Together made this 5.5-minute tutorial on one way to freeze time and space.

Here's an 18-minute video by Sean Tucker on how to improve your food photography skills at home without buying any expensive gear.

If you're gonna take pictures of food for Instagram, at least do them justice. Here are three useful tips that'll help you improve your food and still life photography.

The folks at RocketJump Film School had a little bit of fun with food last month. Just before Thanksgiving, they gave us a peek at some of the weird tricks food stylists and food photographers use to make their meals look delicious (but taste gross).

If you've ever taken a photo of your food for Instagram, now's your chance to delete that photo and do some tangible good for humanity all at the same time!

Imagine how crazy sharing a picture of your dinner with your friends would have been back in the 18th century? Actually you don't have to imagine, IKEA did it for you in this tongue-in-check nod to sharing the perfect dinner shot.

Kristina Lechner of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a fake-food photographer (not to be confused with a fake food-photographer). Her project Food Not Food is a series of tasty photos in which everything in the frame is something inedible that was found around the house.

This is an older video, published back in February of 2015, but the lesson is timeless. The video's creators call it "the one thing holding you back from compositional perfection," and it's this: style to the camera.

Set designer/artist Nicole Heffron and photographer Henry Hargreaves latest collaboration pays homage to the best known filmmakers in history. Each month for a year, they designed and photographed a different cult filmmaker's "birthday meal."

Taking a quick snapshot of your meal at restaurants has become a widespread pre-meal ritual in recent years. People often like to keep a memento of the food they eat, and perhaps share that image with others online as well.

But if you're a foodie blogger and/or photographer in Germany, you might want to think twice the next time you pull out your camera: your simple photo could constitute copyright infringement.

Camden, London-based commercial still life photographer Piotr Gregorczyk likes to play with food and gravity. One concept he has focused on for a number of recent projects is the idea of showing various food dishes flying through the air as they come together on a plate or in a bowl.

With a little ingenuity, you can use everyday objects to craft a beautiful photoshoot of professional proportions. In her latest video on Vimeo, photographer Jenny Woodward showcases how to use natural light and household objects to photograph different bits of food, from cookies to a salad. Most captivating is how she utilizes each household object to manipulate the light around her subject.

Chinese restaurants are known to have painfully bad food photos adorning the walls to show the different dishes offered, …

Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.

One of the hottest food photographers on Instagram in the past couple of months is an anonymous user who goes by the name Chef Jacques LaMerde. It's not the quality of the photos that's attracting attention, but rather the subject matter. Each of the shots shows cheap junk food arranged to look like the artistic plates found at high-end restaurants.

When it comes to food photography, particularly beverages, one of the most difficult things to capture is steam. Not only do the drinks not stay warm for very long, but the steam is often nearly transparent and hard to catch on camera.

It’s not news to most of us that the majority of food photography doesn't feature the actual food you'll receive in the establishment. Or if it does, it features a lot more besides.

So the question becomes: is it possible to make a take-away McDonald's quarter-pounder look like the piece of culinary perfection we see in advertisements using nothing more than an iPhone? We’re about to find out.

Second to actual food, there's nothing more appetizing than feasting your eyes on some beautiful food photography. Perfectly-crafted meals with just the right amount of sauce and the perfect garnish all contribute to the mouth-watering photography we come across.

This series from Australian photographer T.Q. Lee, however, is going to require a second look. Because if you look closely, you'll quickly realize that these are not the kinds of meals you want to sink your teeth into.

Not exactly a reliable scientific study, a recent Craigslist rant by one "Busy NYC Restaurant" that describes itself as "a popular restaurant for both locals and tourists" has gotten a lot of press time for drawing attention to a troubling intersection of food service and photography.

Posted in the rants and raves section of the online classifieds site, the restaurant supposedly compared security footage from 2004 with that from 2014 and found that taking cell phone photos and other smartphone shenanigans have added nearly an hour to the average table time at the restaurant.

Believing the world cares what you had for lunch may still be a symptom of narcissism, but a recent study seems to indicate that it could at least be a useful form of narcissism.

The study, which was conducted by marketing researchers at Brigham Young University, found that the more time people spend looking at pictures of food, the less interested they become in actually eating that same foods. Results were published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Nothing makes a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, or in this case, a baked potato, look more warm and appetizing than a beautiful cloud of steam. Immediately, your taste buds think of a hot, comforting meal, and your nose can almost sniff the fresh-from-the-oven smell.

KFC Restaurants recently opened a new concept store in Louisville, Kentucky called KFC eleven. (The "eleven" being a tribute to the 11 herbs and spices in KFC's original recipe chicken). The new store has a distinctly modern look, and is far from the red and white color palette made popular by Colonel Sanders.

The new concept required a new direction for the photography as well. KFC eleven's creative agency, (Creative Alliance) asked us to help them create the visual feel for this new brand.

"Fast Food" is a series of food photos by photographer Jon Feinstein. The images have a rather unusual look to them -- each food item is captured in front of a purely black backdrop, and is squashed on the surface as though it's being pressed against a pane of glass.

Well, actually they were: Feinstein created the images by scanning the foods with a flatbed scanner.

Professional food photography is a legitimate pursuit that takes some serious skill. It's done in a studio, with professional lighting and often enlists the help of a professional food stylist to get the shot just right.

Food pics are a different matter, often taken in a restaurant with a cell phone while the other people at the table wait impatiently to dig in. The humorous clip above pokes fun at the latter.

Younger photographers may not understand it, or even feel the same way, but for photographers of my generation, your studio was not just a place to take photographs -- it was a reflection of you. It told the world who you were. If you didn't have one, then you weren't really a photographer!