Canon 7D, Canon 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens, 1/250 sec at ƒ/2.8, ISO 100

Last week I did my first “ice cream” photo shoot. Everything you see in the above photo is edible, however it’s not real ice cream (just a LOT of sugar with a cherry on top). I used a recipe found in the “Food Styling for Photographers” book. It’s basically just a tub of cherry frosting with powdered sugar mixed together in a mixer. If you’re interested in creating photos like these I would highly recommend that book … there are a lot of other great tips for styling ice cream and other types of food as well.

After I got the “ice cream” mixed and placed in the bowl I used a can of “Pillsbury Easy Frost” to top the ice cream and look like whipped cream (this way it didn’t melt or ooze down the side of the frosting before I was done with the shoot). I also stuck a toothpick into the bottom of the cherry so it would stay in place and not topple over.

I’m really happy how this one turned out and plan on shooting different flavors in the near future. :)

The last few days I’ve posted photos from a food shoot I did, and I thought I’d share some tips on how I styled it.

When you make yourself a sandwich at home they don’t usually look all poofy and airy, they usually end up flattened with all the ingredients mushed together. Well, I wanted my sandwich to look like all of the ingredients were stacked up beautifully, and wanted those nice little curls to the deli meat, so I did more than just place all the pieces on top of each other.

In order to keep the sandwich from being flat and saggy I cut small pieces of cardboard and layered them as-needed in-between the elements. I put one under and on-top of the lettuce, and then I used tooth-pick halves to pin the bunched-up deli meat in place. The toothpicks also helped to add bulk and hold up the tomatoes, which were placed (along with the top piece of bread) directly on the deli meat.

Food styling is all about making food look delicious. I do my best to try and make food look natural, fresh and clean, and sometimes that involves adding elements that you wouldn’t necessarily eat. I usually don’t do anything “unnatural” to my food when I’m styling it, but do have a few tricks I use that you wouldn’t normally do when you’re preparing food to eat.

In this shot I needed to “bulk up” the pasta so it would look like a nice heaping bowl of food. In order to do this I added a half-dome of styrofoam (you can find these at craft stores—I got a styrofoam sphere at Michaels near the floral department and then cut it in half to fit the bowl). For the actual shot I trimmed the base of it down a little bit from what you see in the image on the left, and then piled the pasta directly on top. If I had placed the pasta directly in the bowl it would sit flat, and I wouldn’t get the nice bulkiness that the fully-styled image is showing.

Styling is something that can really make a big difference in your food images. Heck, it’s so important in the industry that some people make it their full-time job! And since I mostly do my own food photography then I have no one but me to rely on to make my images look good.

In the images above it’s pretty obvious which image was styled and which was not. The image on the left was photographed at an an outdoor taco stand, so the food is fresh, and not too bad-looking, but it’s not quite as appealing as the image on the right. The image on the right is fully edible … it got cold during the shooting process so it didn’t get eaten but other than that, and a few different ingredients than the taco-stand image, it’s basically the same. I spent several minutes placing the ingredients exactly where I wanted them to be … everything is in its place because I wanted it to be there.

In my photos I will usually do as much styling as needed to make the image look great. Sometimes it makes the image inedible (like adding soap-suds to bacon to give it a “foamy” look), but most of the time everything in the dish is natural … so don’t think that you have to do anything weird to your food to make it “photographable”. The key to making food images look good is using fresh, clean, ingredients and having immaculate attention-to-detail. I like to look at lots of food images in magazines and cookbooks to help inspire me for my own creations, and when I look at an image I will usually ask myself “why does it look so tasty?”. When I answer that question I log it away and apply that newfound knowledge in my own photography.

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/30th sec @ƒ/4, ISO 100

When it comes to food photography crisp, clean images are always nice, but sometimes it’s good to mess it up a bit. Get some crumbs on the plate, use that fork/spoon/knife and make the image look like it’s being enjoyed. There are ways to do this and still make the image look tasty.

I am very particular about the styling in my images, so the placement of every crumb, garnish, or droplet was placed there either on purpose or was left in place because I noticed it and liked the way it looked. My ultimate goal is to make the image look like it wasn’t on purpose, but still look tasty enough to eat.

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/15th second at ƒ/5.6, ISO 100

In food photography, and photography in general, a good fundamental tip on composition is to create or find triangles in your images. Triangles keep the viewer’s eyes on the photo, since when you follow a triangle with your eyes you are basically circling around the image, looking at all the elements. In this image the basil leaves are the boldest color, so your eyes probably were drawn to that part of the image first. If you followed your eyes to the other leaves then you were fooled into looking at the entire photo. ;)

Your triangles don’t have to all be the same colors or shapes – they could be as simple as three different elements in an image that your eyes will be easily drawn to. If you are photographing people then the direction of a person’s eyes are going to draw the viewer’s eyes in the same direction, and you could use that element in your “triangle”.

In food photography you will also find that adding this technique to your styling is very pleasing to the eye. I always add the “final touches” to the dish while it’s sitting on its mark, since I have a better view of the image through the viewfinder and can create or find the best placement for things like garnishes and silverware from that perspective.

When you are photographing food you need to make the image look so good you want to eat it. Having a plate of food in front of you is different … it can look sloppy and have no color, but our other senses kick in, such as smell and taste, so it looks appetizing at the time. However, with photography we lose most of those senses and can only rely on our sense of sight, so what the food looks like is extremely important.

This is where styling your food comes into play. The first photo only has pasta in the dish … well, that’s all you see, right? What you don’t see is that hidden below all those carefully placed mounds of linguine is a half-dome of styrofoam. The bulk of the styrofoam gives height to a bowl of pasta that would normally be flattened and caving in. After placing the styrofoam I took five strands of linguine and wrapped them around my fingers, then placed them down carefully so that none of the ends of the pasta strands were showing. I continued until the pasta was covering the styrofoam and looked balanced.

Next I took a pan of pearl onions and tomatoes that had been lightly sauteed and added each element to the dish separately. I used the live-view feature on my camera to help see the bowl of food as it will look when I take the photo – I found this feature to be very useful, btw. The last element I placed was the basil, and I tried to find the best looking leaves in the bunch.

I also added a few items that would typically be in a dining scene – the water glass and fork. The ice in the glass is actually fake – I got the ones in this scene from eBay, but you can find them all over the place (here’s a link to some simple acrylic ice cubes I found on Amazon.com). The ice and splashes you see on high-end commercial photographs are most likely custom-made acrylic – they are quite pricey but worth if if you have the budget. When you are adding these additional elements you want to remember to keep it simple and relevant to the scene, and if you want to add color then remember to either repeat your colors or keep them  complementary to your food dish.