WHAT IS IT LIKE BEING A FULL-TIME FOOD AND BEVERAGE PHOTOGRAPHER?

Chicken soup and wine

Food and beverage photography is so easy, anyone can do it. All it takes is a phone camera and you have the capability to capture wonderful images. Actually, that’s not far off the mark, providing you know how to capture food and beverages well, which requires a good knowledge of lighting and food styling.

For a full-time professional, it’s not quite that easy, and most of us don’t rely on phone cameras. For us, it begins with diligent preparation, which can cover set design, light crafting as well as testing food recipes. Anyone who has had to face photographing dairy products on a warm day can appreciate the importance of having the right recipe for the right shoot and knowing when and when not to attempt the shoot.

A lot of food tends to be brown, which doesn’t matter too much when the only thing we need to do is eat it. But creating an artistic image relies on understanding the food and knowing how and where to introduce garnish to provide a much-needed burst of color. And oftentimes, that can be the difference between a restaurant selling a dish or not. The photograph cannot be a quick snap with little thought being given to it, it must be a carefully crafted image that attracts customers by tantalizing their taste buds well before they take their first bite. The eyes eat before the mouth.

It's surprising just how much work goes into creating a food or beverage image, which may ultimately take several hours to craft. Sometimes that still surprises me, but if that’s what it takes to do the job correctly then so be it. Earlier I mentioned set styling. The surface that the meal or drink sits on is as crucial to the shot as every other component, as after all, it will become a major element within the finished image and must support the theme of the image, which will often depend on how the image is to be used. We have a large selection of backgrounds and construct our wood backgrounds ourselves in-house.

It takes 1/200 of a second to take a photograph. But exceptional photography executed correctly is neither quick or simple, it takes a combination of knowledge, experience, passion, equipment, and perhaps most importantly, a great deal of patience. And while frustrations can sometimes creep into some projects, on the whole, it’s a great deal of fun and extremely satisfying.

The dish in the photograph is chicken soup. Yes, every element within the dish was carefully placed using tweezers, and adjusted as necessary, along with lighting tweaks to get the image just as I wanted it. And those croutons on the plate were placed one by one, again with tweezers so that they ended up just where they were needed. You have to get fussy when creating food images!

True Images Photography provides professional beverage and food commercial photography that gets your business noticed. Feel free to book a free 30-minute consultation here.

Do look around the rest of the blog here for more helpful posts, and if you have any questions please reach out. I’m happy to advise. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where I always answer messages with a detailed reply.

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