Food as a Visual Feast - The Presentation

When food is being prepared to be served to the camera, there are a number of concepts that will need to be applied. It is critical that you understand and have a complete pre-visualized image in your mind of the end product or have prepared your thoughts as a storyboard thumbnail which will guide you and your food stylist or chef as they prepare the food or set. When you are doing your initial layout, the following disciplines should be applied. You should know your target audience and apply the principals of sociology and psychology profiles and last but not least, human anthropology and its effects on instinct. You ask “what does this have to do with taking a photograph”. These disciplines are applied in the Advertising, Fashion, Beauty and Food Industries. Highly experienced Creative Art Directors and accomplished general Photographers will have mastered a complete understanding and know exactly how to apply proven concepts that will deliver the results intended.

Cooking up a Dish to be Photographed

When cooking up a dish you will need the skills of a chef. You will also need a thorough understanding of chemistry. If you do not have the skills or this knowledge you will then need a food stylist who has many years of experience. At issue is the reaction of the food products to heat, time and temperature in order to develop critical color values. An example would be preparing broccoli; you're after the color as primary and texture as secondary importance. If you cook it too short the color will not develop. If you cook it too long the color will be destroyed and the vibrancy will not be apparent. It will have a tendency to appear very dark towards black and not the vibrant rich green that you're after. If you cook it just right, but you prepare it too far in the advance your color will start to oxidize which gives you very poor results.

If you're going to prepare bread or pastries you better be a chemist as these are some of the hardest products to prepare. You can take a shortcut and go to the bakery and order your products but you're more than likely will not achieve the standards that are going to be required to produce a quality photograph. As an example, to prepare an Italian bread loaf you need to have the proper formula, quality products i.e. flour, oil, yeast, salt. Then you're going to need the proper equipment. You also need the skills of an experienced bread baker if your product is going to rise properly. And then you will need at least 12 hours of your time to work the dough and I haven't even got to the critical part, the oven. The home oven will rarely do the job. Once you have your bread baked you now have an issue, was it baked too long or not enough? Remember you're looking for the color that will make it appealing. Check out the Bread shot in the front page portfolio. What you see is three days of prep to place it in front of the camera. Each loaf had to be baked by it-self, and then re-baked several times to achieve the proper color. We prepared sixty loaves of bread to create that shot.

Technical Decisions Dictating Camera Selection

Now we're reaching the point where you need to be an accomplished artist. In Food photography product placement is critical, color arrangements are critical. Then you must address its arrangement for proper balance and to achieve a psychological appealing photograph. You'll now have to deal with the set. This will develop the mood for your photograph. At this point a decision needs to be made, are you going to be able to shoot your photograph in the 35 mm format or will you need to shoot with a large format camera with movable bellows. The majority of your quality food photographs are shot with large format view cameras simply because your glasses must stand up straight and your dishes must be round. 35 mm formats will highly limit your ability to change angles. This is why today you're seeing more and more low angle shots of Food on square plates. One of the reasons for the high use of 35 mm is the inability of the majority of the photographers today are not knowledgeable in the operation and use of a view camera. The view camera is the purview of a highly skilled photographer with many years of experience. The issue today also poses the question, do we shoot with film or do we shoot digital. There are two schools of thought pertaining to which process to use. Having used film for over 50 years and digital since its introduction, the bottom line is it does not matter. The critical question is which camera format and your ability. In the bread shot we used a 4x5 view camera and E 6 film.

Now we have discussed some of the issues we now have to deal with lighting; do we use natural light or do we use studio lights or do we use a mix of lights? This is a decision that produces heated discussions in creative design meetings. The decision selected can make or ruin an Ad or worse yet a cookbook.

The simplest way to understand lighting for food is a concept that lighting used in a beauty shot of a gorgeous sensual model or food that will make you salivate, “is one and the same “.

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