3 Cheap and Easy Ideas for Better Food Photography

 

3 Cheap and Easy Ideas for Better Food Photography is part tutorial and part book review.  Since launching our blog on July 28, 2012, Tiffany and I have learned many new skills – creating a blog, writing for a blog, photography – to name a few. 

And, I’ve read countless articles on the web and a few books on the many facets of blogging:

• the business of blogging
• how to create a blog using WordPress (our blogging platform)
• secrets of blogging
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• and this one, my favorite so far, Food Blogging for Dummies, written by Kelly Senyei.

I should point out that we are not a food blog (I know that’s stating the obvious, but just in case there’s any misunderstanding! {grin})!  We are a lifestyles and mommy blog.

So why read a book about food blogging?  I’ll give you four reasons:

1. If you are in any way involved with Pinterest, you know that food plays an important role and has a prominent place in Pinterest boards.  And, 99% of the food pictures posted on Pinterest are absolutely fabulous, mouth-wateringly delicious (at least to look at) and beautifully styled.  So, if we want to drive more traffic to our blog through Pinterest, we need to learn to take better pictures – food and otherwise (we invite you to follow us on Pinterest and pin our pictures to Pinterest – you can pin directly from every post)!
2. Also, food and recipes play an important part in our blog and as of today, our Sweet Eats category has 68 recipe posts!  So, cooking is, obviously, a very important part of our lives, our family’s history, our culture.
3. And, photography is an important part of our lives.  Tiffany’s father, Joel, is a successful professional photographer thanks to me {grin} (see my post, Jingle Ball 2012, 10 Christmas Wishes and the First Day of Winter).  My father, Chuck, who passed away suddenly this past January, was a lifelong amateur photographer and we are blessed to have many wonderful family pictures over the years because of his talent.
4. And, let’s face it – photography plays an important part in a successful blog and Tiffany and I want this blog to be a success!

When we launched Toot Sweet 4 Two, the only camera I had was my iPhone.  So, all of my photos for the first few months on this blog were taken with my iPhone and Tiffany still uses her iPhone.  Then, my husband surprised me with a Nikon D3200 DSLR camera for Christmas (see Tiffany’s post, Christmas Surprise).  Suddenly, I was pressured to elevate the level of my photos from iPhone to DSLR and the learning curve has been steep and progress slow.  But, in spite of my protracted learning cycle (what?  I can’t spend every waking hour of my toot sweet life learning how to use this camera?  Darn!), I have already, easily, taken 5,000 photos with this new camera!

Quick disclaimer:  many upcoming photos on this blog were taken by me with my iPhone.  I have recipes in my “queue” that are coming up and I won’t be reshooting them for the posts.  What’s my reason for NOT reshooting the photos for the posts if they haven’t yet launched (published)?  Well, that’s what you’ll learn in this post!

Anyway, back to Kelly’s book, Food Blogging for Dummies!  Kelly wears many hats besides blogger for her food blog, Just a Taste.  She’s had much experience in the food industry and her blog is beautiful, tasteful (no pun intended!) and her food photographs are outstanding.  I’ve struggled with food photography for several reasons:

1. I am usually photographing food at night in my artificially lit kitchen
2. I don’t, yet, know how to use my new camera’s bells and whistles and primarily shoot my photos on the “Auto” mode
3. And while I know how to cook, and I’m a pretty decent cook, I don’t know anything about food styling!

Her book covers these dilemmas as well as all the other aspects of blogging and she covers them well!  With 16 chapters divided into 6 parts, she covers blogging from conception of an idea burning in the back of your mind to marketing your blog and beyond in a clear, concise, easy-to-read fashion addressing everything you need to do to get started, get focused, get with it, get better and better!

So, these 3 Cheap and Easy Ideas for Better Food Photography were inspired by her Part IV:  Eating with Your Eyes, which covers Food Photography Basics, Equipment and Tools, Styling and Photographing Food.

Cheap and Easy Idea #1 – Use Natural Light to Photograph Food – Cost $Zero

This is easier said than done, at least for me.  My kitchen is located towards the interior part of our home and my kitchen sink looks out over our great room instead of outside to the world beyond.  And, my shiny, beautiful, easy-to-clean granite countertop is a continual source of angst when photographing food because of countless, endless surface reflections.  Even with all the lights shut off in the kitchen, that countertop glistens and glows.

Here’s what happens:

 

The only other possible place to take food pictures for our recipes is on my kitchen table and, it too, is shiny and reflective because of a shellac finish!  I’ve marked the table for you in the photo above so that you can better appreciate my dilemma!  All the other pictures in the collage above are reflections on the counter:  reflections of lights, cabinets, refrigerator, stove, my dad’s sculpture, and a rooster sitting on my counter!  The second picture on the bottom left that looks like a bubble is actually a ceiling light fixture, turned off, in my great room no less!  Reflecting all the way from my great room!

Here’s a collage of a couple of pictures I took in my early blogging career with my iPhone on this countertop:

 

 

I’m marked them up for you with red arrows so that you can see all the things reflecting in the countertop, primarily the ceiling fan in the great room!  They are seriously out-of-focus and, yes, I could crop these out but one of Kelly’s tips is to take the best, tightly-focused shot that you can and avoid the editing process including cropping.  And, she’s right.  There are so many steps to creating a blog post, that if you can cut down on some of them by taking better pictures and not editing them, you are a step ahead.

The story continues on Page 2…