Fun with Food Photography

I am having so much fun playing with food photography! Can you believe that the picture above is one that I actually took?! I went to the Food Photography workshop at FNCE yesterday, and I learned a ton of great information. The workshop was instructed by Janet Helm and Regan Jones of Healthy Aperture, Liz Weiss from the Meal Makeover Moms, and Melina Hammer, a professional food photographer.

Some of the main take-a-ways that I got from this workshop are:

– I really need to step up the quality of my pictures! We went over some common mistakes, and I am guilty of almost all of them… yikes!

– There are some great apps that can help to create wonderful pictures

▪ Instagram

▪ Diptic

▪ PicMonkey

– It is important to know what exactly you are trying to portray. The photographs tell a story, so you need to make sure that you are capturing the entire story.

– Use natural light when taking food pictures

We were able to practice taking pictures in 3 different settings. Below are some of the not-so-great shots followed by my favorites of the day.

This is the 1st not-so-great shot for various reasons… the carpet is showing, the picture is shot diagonally, and it is not primarily focused on the food.

This one is a much better shot because it captures the food…

This one is a disaster 🙂 You can’t even tell what the food is because there is so much going on in the background.

Much better… but, it could still be even closer.

Even though this picture was not good at all, I was able to save it with the right software!

I ended up cropping the picture, rotating it and then used the app AfterFocus to help with the lovely blurred out effect. I am so excited that I found this app, because I was worried that I was going to need to buy an expensive camera to be able to create that effect.