The food industry is booming. Chefs are sharing their recipes, and home cooks are advancing their cooking hobbies online. Only the dish’s name on the menu is not enough anymore. People need to see a realistic picture of the dishes before they order. Let’s not forget the food bloggers and reviewers. All of these needs a great level of creative food photography. If you are a food photographer or blogger, you will need to come up with creative food product photography ideas.
This blog is all about exploring and finding out some catchy and creative food product photography ideas. We came up with some tips, tricks, and some creative food product photography.
Creative Ideas for Food Product Photography
Food product photography is done usually to advertise or review food. Therefore, you have to take pictures that look scrumptious and promising to the viewers. Once you try out some basic ideas, you also start cultivating ideas of your own. Creative food product ideas come spontaneously as you play around with angles, objects, and backgrounds.
To make your food product photography stand out, you have to come up with unique and creative ideas. The setup and organisation of the food need to be different, eye-catchy and delicious as well. But for the time being, we are here to help you with some worthy and creative food product photography ideas. Therefore, we have come up with 10 creative food product photography ideas.
1. Decorate and Make the Food look Appetising
When you are taking pictures of the food product, just putting it on a tray or plate will not help you get a good shot of it. You have to make the food look appetising. You need to decorate in a way that makes a bitter gourd look tasty to a person who doesn’t like it.
Slicing up the food, organising it in a beautiful way with some sauce and garnish can make the food look mouth-watering. You can add in a small flower or other kinds of elements to make the picture look aesthetically pleasing. Decorate the food, but do not use something that is stealing the highlight from the main food in the picture.
2. Create an Environment or a Theme That Goes with Your Food
Creating an ambience and capturing the food image is a wonderful way of food product photography. For example, if you are taking pictures of dumplings and ramen in a busy China Town restaurant, it can tell a different story to its viewers. It will show the food and where it is coming from.
It can also be a dim-lit restaurant for more formal gatherings or a date. The food here can be presented in a way that looks romantic with a touch of candle burning and some flowers and napkins. The food product photography here should bring out the food and sentiment behind them.
You can also work with themes. Create a theme that goes with the food, just like the pie above, which gives a full-on fall vibe. It gives the photo an artistic value and makes people connect to it.
3. Raw Ingredients
Food product photography means capturing the main food, which can be anything like bread, tomato or chilli sauce, apple pies and all the food in the world. In order to convince the consumer of the food, the best trick is to show the raw ingredients that go into the food.
To demonstrate that you can use the ingredients to decorate your main food. For instance, shooting a freshly baked bread among the flours and multigrain it was made from. Or, if you are shooting a fruit juice, a transparent glass filled with the juice and surrounded by the raw fruits sliced and unsliced can give you a nice decoration to click your image.
4. Add Some Human Touch
A human touch to the food product photography can always bring out the beauty of the image. Click pictures when a hand is tweaking with the food. It can be yours, or the chef or of someone who is going to devour it. It makes the photo look more natural and lively.
Many times the food photography just comes out as something delicate or like a show-piece. However, giving a human touch creates an interaction with the food and helps to serve its purpose. For example, you can capture a baker giving the final touches to a cake. Also, you can click a photo when someone is slicing a stake. Or it can be capturing the chef while they are cooking.
5. Play with a Background
Before, we talked about the environment, but you can also opt for a self-made set-up or pay for a background. There are lots of backgrounds that you can choose to do some creative, excellent food product photography. Remember, the background must help to highlight the food as a subject and make the overall picture look aesthetically pleasing.
Essentially, backdrops help to take beautiful wide-angle shots. Here are some easy and beautiful backdrops that you can create to-do food product photography.
Firstly, you can try bokeh food product photography. Bokeh food product photography keeps the main focus on the subject and blurs out the background. Here you can keep your food in front of some twinkling light source like candles, fairy lights or bokeh light balls. Then, focus on the food using a large-aperture lens and blur out the background. You can also use this technique to separate a single dish or food among multiple dishes.
Secondly, you can use plain or subtle background. For this, you can use a colourful background like colour paper or painting that helps the subject be more in focus. But always remember to decorate the main subject so that it doesn’t look bland. Windows and curtains can also make great backdrops to take good shots of food.
6. Splash and Capture
You can use the splash technique while capturing beverages, smoothies, drinks, and even foods with soupy and gravy textures. Your best capture can come from splashing a liquid food subject, and it creates extra dynamics in your shots. But take special care of the camera, lenses and use a counter that you can clean easily later on. Keep a towel by your side, most importantly.
Firstly, consider shooting your image in RAW format so that you can edit the image later on and make the splashes more prominent. Secondly, use fast shutter speeds and give your image the effect that it is frozen in time. With fast shutter speed, your camera freezes motion. Use a fast shutter speed of 1/1000+ as it records motion and makes it static. Because the light gets to hit the image sensor for only a short time, it doesn’t sense the whole motions, just fractions of them.
Lastly, keep your camera in a continuous shooting mood so that it clicks several shots of the splash moment. Use ice cube, sugar cube, fruits, or veggies or the liquid itself to create the splash. Don’t forget to start clicking the moment you throw the object that will create the splash.
7. Dark Food Photography
Here again, it is a creative idea using the background. The concept behind the dark food product photography is playing with a dark or shadowy backdrop. Here you will need dark props, surfaces, or any other kind of dark food product photography backdrop.
An ashy, marble mosaic or a wooden board top can do the work here. A dark or wooden backdrop gives the image a rustic effect to your photo. Wooden props can do wonders. You can use anything like a tabletop, a shelf, or a chair. Piling up dark stones at the back can do the work as well. You can use the bokeh effect here too.
More simple things like dark curtains or satins can create a beautiful background as well. A dark backdrop works with any type of food, especially when you are shooting beverages of different colours.
8. Keep Things Simple
When clicking colourful dishes with lots of elements and ingredients, try to keep the surroundings simple. Present it in a most minimalistic way. It is more true when you are capturing gourmet food. If you are working with powerful or authentic food, let its beauty speak for itself in the image.
Even if you are working with something simple, if something doesn’t add on to it, remove it from the camera frame. For example, it can be the napkin which is looking excessive, the plate pattern may be too complex and taking charm away from the food. Remove it if it doesn’t enhance the beauty of the food.
9. Shoot Foods in the Mid-Air
This idea is quite similar to the splash idea, and you have to use similar camera techniques to capture food in mid-air. If your main food subjects are like a packet of chips, crisps, or even small fruits like berries, you can capture them in mid-air. It can be a wild concept, but if you take shots from right angles, you will create some beautiful images.
You can take pictures while the cook is stir-frying or tossing the food to mix. Capture the image when the cook is throwing the food upward. This is a type of picture that doesn’t fail to get the viewer’s attention. Plus, it will give everyone the professional Master Chef vibe when they look at the picture.
10. Add Smoke
Who doesn’t love hot and freshly cooked dishes? In order to capture how tempting a hot cup of tea or coffee is or just about any cooked food, smokes are one of the best ways to represent it. Here you have to be quick because foods get cold fast, and at least don’t remain so hot to release smoke that you will want to show in your photo.
Furthermore, you can add a dark background to capture the smoke with all its intensity. A light background will not help you to focus on the smoke in the picture. Therefore, place the hot mug of coffee or that deliciously smoking soup in front of a dark background and start clicking.
Tips on Food Product Photography
Now that you have some brilliant creative food product photography ideas, let us give you some valuable tips. Photography is all about lights and experimenting with different techniques and ideas. If you are just starting out as a food photographer, you need to be aware of the intensity of the light. You have to understand how the lights will hit the food and adjust them accordingly. Here are some tips initial tips for starting food photography.
1. Use Natural Lights to Take Photos.
Stay away from using overhead lighting or lamps and also built-in flash. This creates unnecessary shadows, noises, and colour distortions.
2. Find the Best Source of Natural Light.
Move around and find a place where you can find a good background and natural light as well. Don’t stick to a single place to take food photos. Instead, try out different places or different times of the day to click the perfect pictures.
3. Take Pictures From Different Angles.
You want to capture the food at its best. For instance, if you are taking a picture of a burger, take it from a side angle to show the layer. Take the picture from above if it’s a pizza and if it’s a beverage, try a 45-degree angle. But don’t stick to just a single angle. Move around the plate or food and take images from several angles and pick the best one later.
4. Remove Unwanted Things.
Remove things that don’t enhance the food, which is the main subject of the image. For example, remove it if the spoon, napkin, and the busy background are not working with food. Do not have prints or too many cutleries that might overwhelm the main dish.
Tricks on Tackling Some Common Food Photography Problem
Not satisfied with how the food product photography is coming out? Not to worry, even the most professional photographer faces this problem. Here are some tricks to solve some recurring problems.
1. Blurry Photos
Not holding the camera properly or too much shaking, moving of the camera causes blurry images. You can do the following things:
- Hold your camera steady; use a belt to get support.
- Use a tripod to keep your camera steady while shooting pictures for a long time.
- Increase your shutter speed and move to a place where there are more lights.
You can also use high ISO, but it may reduce image quality.
2. The Colour of the Food Doesn’t Appear Real.
Use the white balance tool to fix the colour of the image. The colour looks just as it should be if the white balance is set properly. Shoot your photos in the RAW format. You will get lots of space to adjust the colour of the image later on. It will also help you to edit the picture later on without reducing the image quality.
3. Your Pictures do not Pop up like Professional Food Photography.
A professional or experienced food photographer uses lenses that help them narrow the depth of the field to highlight the food in the photo. Then with the help of software like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop, they fix the contrast, sharpness, and brightness of the image. Editing the picture can help you give good finishing to your images and help to make the main subject pop out.
Final Thoughts on Food Product Photography
Always focus on the product you are working with and what can possibly represent it in the best way possible. In this way, you can come up with plenty of creative food product photography ideas of your own. There are plenty of ideas on the internet as well. But most importantly, if you want to become a professional food photographer, signup for Food Photography Course Online now and get exclusive training.
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