Hi, My name is Dia, and I am a brain surgery survivor many times over. I have been diagnosed over the years with, in addition to my Food Photography
Posted by Administrator on January 2nd, 2009. Filed under: Vegetarian.
I get asked often how I go about taking photos of food. I have a very simple process. First I cook and prepare the meal. I then look around my house for the best lighting. Usually this is in my dining room, so I put the meal on the table and then snap the picture. It really is that easy. I rarely use a tripod and flash, but sometimes if the situation calls for those accessories, I do.
The lenses I use most often are my Nikon 50mm 2.8 macro lens and my Nikon 85mm 1.4 lens. These two take amazing, sharp images.
You are probably going to come across some lengthy guides to food photography, and may wonder why mine is so short and to the point. The reason is it really is that simple.
For this photo I placed a colored board that I purchased at a craft store behind the shallots, and some patterned vellum paper underneath, which you can’t see because it is covered by the chopping board, maybe this is a better example:
You can see the checkered vellum paper underneath the chopping board. This gives the illusion of a nice table covered with a pretty cloth. The colored board behind the garlic isn’t very thick, but will be substantial enough for a few months of photo shoots.
I shot the photo with my Nikon D200 and with a 50mm macro lens. No flash was used. This was taken at night with just my kitchen lights above me. I processed this with Adobe Lightroom, and like I said, it really was that easy.
I process all of my photos with Adobe Lightroom because I feel this is the best software for converting RAW files to JPEG. If I need to use photoshop to tweak a few things, I will, but this is also very rare.
If you want to get into food photography, just go for it. Now with the use of digital photography, if you make a mistake, you can just take another picture without worrying about film. I know some other guides will encourage you to take hundreds of photos for each shoot, but remember, depending on which DSLR you use, the camera will usually only survive up to 100,000 images. After this things will start to break. So, take as many pictures as you need to in order to get the perfect shot, but remember your camera can’t handle too many.
My last bit of advice is don’t worry too much, and have fun. After all, if this isn’t what you want to be doing, it will show in your photos.
Cheers,
D
