If there was a personal silver lining to all the covid lockdowns, it must have been the excessive amount of time I had to explore food photography.
To say that covid has made its mark would be the understatement of the century, and the resulting lockdowns have not been easy for many of us. Apart from the suffering and grief experienced by those who lost loved ones due to covid, the lockdowns have driven many people to boredom. Not being allowed to go far from home, or not being able to leave home at all, forced us to rethink our pastimes. As someone who especially enjoys landscape, urban, and animal photography I clearly had to come up with a 'plan B'. After all, there were only so many indoor photo shoots my dogs and cat would tolerate.
Being a self-confessed foodie, I knew I had to marry my love for food with my passion for photography.
If social media are anything to go by, most of us have taken a significant number of food photos. Who hasn't shared a picture of their favourite pizza from their local Italian restaurant, or that huge steak you put on the barbeque for your family? But many of these photos tend to be shot in the spur of the moment; sometimes all that's made it to the photo is some greasy cutlery, an empty plate, and a crumpled napkin.
Getting Ready
I knew I could do better than that. The first thing I did was play back a significant number of food photography videos on YouTube. After all, I had plenty of time to burn. It would be remiss of me if I did not give a big shout-out to Joanie Simon and her The Bite Shot videos and website. Joanie's passion and enthusiasm for food photography have greatly encouraged me to experiment with this type of photography.
Second, I enrolled in an online training course and spend many hours reviewing food photography instructions, hints, and best practices from the masters. It soon became apparent that a number of things are critical when shooting food, for example:
The styling of the food
The lighting
The props
The background
A highly versatile tripod
With those lessons learned, I started to collect props (plates, bowls, napkins of all colours, an old oven tray, and other 'food stuff'), I made a couple of backgrounds as DIY projects, and also ended up investing in a proper speedlight, a flash umbrella, flash bounce cards, and various vinyl backdrops (highly recommended for food photography). I was ready to get started!
Experimenting
The dining table soon became my studio. I set up my gear, backdrops, and props before we had lunch or dinner. Then, when the food was ready to be served, I plated up, put it in my 'studio', and composed my shots: from an angle, from above, high, low, tightly cropped or wider; you name it, I tried it. The most challenging part for me was to get the lighting right. Shooting with flash pulled me out of my comfort zone big time. I spent an endless amount of time experimenting with my lighting setup: setting the intensity of the flash, the distance and angle of the umbrella to the food, the number and position of the bounce cards, the quality and intensity of the ambient light, it all got my attention.
Needless to say that many hot meals had turned cold by the time we started eating. If my wife was ever annoyed about it, she didn't say so and I love her for that.
Lessons Learned
After all the experimenting, I can honestly say that I love food photography. I have found a new way to creatively express myself in ways I never thought of before, and well outside the 'boundaries' of my usual photography subjects. Food photography also challenged me to face my fear of flash photography head-on. I'm not going to claim that I have become the best food photographer ever - so many others are more deserving of that title - or that I have completely mastered flash photography. There is still much learning and experimenting to do, but what a joy it's been to pick up a new style of photography! The skills that I learned are applicable in many other areas of photography as well and have made me a more complete photographer. I challenge you to do the same; explore and master new types of photography, get out of your comfort zone, and be the best photographer you can be.
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