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."
Food photographers have all kinds of tricks they use to make food -- or what appears to be food -- look appealing on camera. Those tricks are revealed in a new photo project titled Faking It.
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!
With the help of food stylist Charlotte Omnes, New York still life and food photographer Beth Galton put together an interesting series of photos that shows what prepared and packaged foods look like in cross section.
In this article, I will share a behind-the-scenes look at how I created photos of fried chicken for one of the world's most iconic brands: KFC.
My studio had already been shooting nearly all of KFC's print work for more than a year when their in-house creative group first contacted us. Turns out they found us through a Google search, and didn't even realize we had done work for KFC until they saw some of the images on our website.
Nashville, Tennessee-based food photographer Kyle Dreier has a curious project titled Pairings. The main theme of the photographs can be summarized with the questions: "What food really go well together?" and "What are the stereotypical food pairings?" Dreier finds a good and a drink that are commonly consumed together, binds them together with some string, and shoots a photo of the pairing.
Over the past three years, Foodspotting has made a name for itself by using user-generated pictures to help you find the tastiest dish in the vicinity. And even though we've seen an anti-photo movement in upscale restaurants recently, the app clearly still has a lot to offer. We say clearly because reservation company OpenTable just agreed to buy the company for $10M in cash.
A new piece over at The New York Times is bringing to light an issue that, to be honest, we hadn't realized had gotten so bad. Apparently, amateur food photography is out of control, forcing many restaurants to begin implementing bans or other photo related policies.
There's a reason that most of the foods you buy never look like the photos used to advertise them. Food photographers and stylists have all kinds of random tricks up their sleeve for making food items look picture perfect. Here's a list of various household products that are commonly used to make dishes look more appealing. A warning, though: you might lose your appetite.
Ever notice how food at McDonald’s never looks like the ones pictured in advertisements? Here’s a behind-the-scenes video that …
Here’s a short and sweet video in which Chicago-based food photographer Stephen Hamilton …
Here’s an eye-opening look at the world of food styling and photography, where Elmer’s glue is used for cereal …
It's pretty amazing how much work goes in to commercial food photography, even if it's a delivery pizza. Domino's Pizza has a short video showing the behind-the-scenes action during a pizza photo shoot, complete with food stylists, a pizza screwed to the table, and a hand model. But Domino's new ad movement is all about ditching the food embellishments and promising "natural" photos from now on -- photos of pizzas made by employees and untouched by food artists during the photo shoot. (Though we noticed they didn't promise to go easy on post-processing!)