There is no human experience more universal than food, which makes it an ideal photography subject. And while smartphone cameras and social media have made snapping and sharing food photos easier than ever, a little skill still goes a long way. Even the fanciest culinary creations can look like unappetizing piles under the wrong lighting or from a weird angle. 

Seeking out tips to take more flattering food photographs, we spoke to veteran cookbook photographer Jim Sullivan about how to take the most flattering food photos in any circumstances and with any gear.

Style the food

First thing’s first, the position of the food matters a great deal—including how much of them appear in the shot. Sullivan tells us how he would approach photographing sushi differently than he would a sandwich: “If it’s two pieces of nigiri, I want to have some negative space,” he says. “I might have a little bit of the table and plate in there as reference, but the negative space to draw your attention to the nigiri is important.” Try adding more or less negative space as you shoot to find the right balance.

With something like a “sandwich, a steak, or even a donut,” he may take more of a lifestyle approach. “A drink, chips, some hands in the photograph might make sense. You can see the whole spread but your eye goes right to the sandwich.” Practice moving other objects around in the photos to figure out how they can support the main subject rather than distracting from it.

If the plate has crumbs or other crud on it, give it a quick wipe to make everything look clean and planned.

Think about depth, mood, and contrast

Variables like texture, height, and color demand consideration. The height of a sandwich might be better served by a lower angle to make it look towering. In the case of sushi, he advises to “meter for the fish, but you want to make sure you capture the texture of the rice.” Getting in close or adding some directional light from the side can help pull out those small details.

Techniques from other disciplines can help with food. “I approach food just like portraiture. In portraits, you want to focus on and flatter the eyes and pay attention to how shadows fall across someone’s face,” Sullivan says. Including the edge of a plate in front of the food can add depth, while the shadows created by the food provide texture. 

Your surfaces are important in framing the photograph

Dressing the set often comes down to personal preference. “For some reason I really hate orange tabletops,” says Sullivan. “They’re not really flattering but a lot of places have them.” When he sees a background or surface that doesn’t work, he advises looking for other surfaces to use. In one instance, he utilized a “crack in the cement on the floor” as a background element of a shot, and has even used fabric chairs. Look around to see what surfaces might be complementary and not distracting to the dish. 

If you’re at home, experiment with different plates or serving dishes. Some photographers will even use unique materials like tiles or stones if the subject calls for it. 

Find the right light

Simplicity goes a long way with food photography. “The best light is a cloudy day. Soft light,” Sullivan notes. “If it’s a sunny day, you might move the dish near a window” where you can utilize flat, diffused light. “In my experience, food doesn’t photograph well in harsh light.”

He also recommends paying close attention to the shadows. The way a shadow can give shape to food and the direction the light falls is important in creating shapes and drawing your eyes to the right spots in the photo without being distracting. Light from the side will create deeper shadows that accentuate texture. That’s handy for emphasizing the layers of a tart, but not ideal for something like a fondant-covered cake that you want to look as smooth as possible. 

For more advanced lighting options, he recommends small, portable lights like the Profoto C1 Plus or something similar. “I shoot a lot of stuff on location, and I always have a little light I carry with me when I travel.” Even a small reflector can come in handy if you want to bounce a little window light back into the shadowy side of your food without flashing in a restaurant.

Your phone and apps can be powerful tools

When shooting with a mobile phone, Sullivan uses VSCO to shoot RAW files, which is especially helpful to adjust white balance. “In restaurants during services, lighting can be really warm in terms of white balance, so you might have to cool it down a bit.” The extended color information contained in a RAW file will give you more flexibility to adjust not only color balance, but also adjust exposure on your images.

If you’re shooting at home, try to narrow down the illumination to a single color temperature. Mixing window light with artificial overhead light, for instance, can make food look unnatural and unappetizing. Kill the overheads or move away from the window to get consistent color that you can correct in post.

Don’t be afraid to move around

“If you’re in the back of a restaurant, you can pick up the dish and go towards the front of the restaurant where there’s a window.” Sullivan points out that restaurants and waitstaff know that people want to get good photographs of their food. While most businesses would be appreciative of quality photos of their items being put out into the world, Sullivan warns “you have to be aware, and don’t be disruptive” to other patrons and staff.

The post Pro tips for taking flattering food photos in any setting appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Louise Palmberg’s love for food shines through in her photographs. The New York-based food and drink photographer (by way of Sweden) shoots for commercial clients like Starbucks, Cointreau, Carl’s Jr. and The Cheesecake Factory.

Here she shares her tips for how to make dishes look delicious. She also chats with us about the joys of working with a prop stylist and explains why she prefers to shoot with strobes. So tuck in your napkin, it’s time to talk food photography.

How did you get started with food and drink photography?

Both my parents worked in restaurants growing up and I think I set foot in my first commercial kitchen when I was 12. I was working in kitchens throughout high school and while I was in art school, I realized that I couldn’t stay away from restaurants. I’ve always really loved food. And I feel very connected to it and I love people who work in restaurants.

I had this realization when I was a junior in college, I think it was around 3 AM, as I was standing on the subway platform waiting for my train. Throughout art school, I’d been lost, trying to figure out what I wanted to shoot. Suddenly I was just like, “what if I shot food and restaurants?” And I figured it out. That is what I should do.

I started connecting with people who I knew working in kitchens and asked if I could come to shoot in their kitchen. I also did a year-long food project about executive chefs under 30 in New York City. That project helped me build my book, from a food and restaurant perspective.

The restaurant and the photo industry obviously took a big hit during the pandemic, but I know you were still shooting, can you tell me a bit about the images that you were making during that time? 

For most of the pandemic, I was all alone. I lived by myself in this apartment, I couldn’t see anyone and all my jobs went away. But obviously, I am obsessed with my job and I couldn’t stop doing it. So I started talking to my prop stylist, Caroline Dorn. And we started this personal collaboration where we would talk about an idea and then she would go to her storage and pack boxes of props for me. She would then leave them outside my door, and over a videochat, she’d help me style my shoots.

I also knew I wanted to get more into beverage photography and the best way to attract new clients is to shoot a bunch of self-assigned work. I shot a bunch of cocktails in isolation (like the one above).

What are the benefits of working with a stylist on a shoot? 

It’s really nice when you work with a prop stylist who really gets you and really works with your vibe well. I met Caroline on set for Cointreau and we just really hit it off immediately. She sources stuff that I didn’t even know I wanted. I feel like if I’m working without a prop stylist, which I rarely do these days, it’s hard to kind of think outside the box. When I’m working with Caroline, she’ll send me six different napkins and a ramekin that I didn’t know I wanted. It’s like she reads my mind.

What’s your go-to gear when you are shooting on location? 

I shoot with a Nikon D850 99% of the time—unless it’s a billboard because then I’ll shoot medium format.  And I really enjoy shooting with the [battery-powered] Profoto B10 strobes because they are super versatile, easy to throw in my backpack and just so powerful.

I started working with them because you never know where you’re going to find an electrical outlet in a restaurant. So I always prefer shooting with a battery-powered strobe. It’s very often the only light I use. I can control it from my phone, I can put it anywhere and it’s so easy and so powerful. I’ll use a variety of modifiers with it. I personally love a hard shadow, so some of my favorites will be reflectors and grids. And I like to use a soft modifier for a key light or for highlighting bottles. I also use two strip lights to enhance the shape of the bottle.

Do you ever use natural light when shooting food or beverages? 

It’s very rare that I shoot only with natural light. Depending on where I’m shooting, it will usually be a mix of both. I definitely prefer strobes because I can control them. When shooting editorial content, I have to work with whatever the lighting situation is at the destination—whether it’s the restaurant or someone’s home. It requires a lot of thinking on your feet, which is also why the B10 strobes are so good. They’re also so small and don’t take up much room. 

Plus, a lot of restaurants plan their [in-house] lighting to have an enjoyable dining experience. But all of it is overhead lights and it looks like crap when you try to shoot it. So I always try to supplement or enhance the experience through strobes.

What’s your favorite food or drink item to photograph?

I love a colored liquid—a beer, wine, or whiskey.  With those, I can light through the liquid and cast a colored shadow onto the [background] surface. I also love a glowy bottle.

From a food perspective, I love a hyper-saturated kind of warm, inviting feel. So I love it when the scene is maybe not 100% perfect. I like it when it’s a little bit lived in and it has a lot of color and texture. Lately, I’ve been shooting a lot of brunches and a lot of tablescapes—big tables filled with food. And that’s always fun.

What advice would you offer to someone who is just getting started with food photography?

Try to gang up with someone who knows how to cook. Or just cook yourself. Shooting some beautiful dishes at home is so valuable so you can have something to show. Going to a bakery or going to a coffee shop or a restaurant and purchasing something and shooting the dish that comes out, I think is also super valuable. And then honestly, just go into a restaurant that seems friendly and ask if you can shoot something for them. It’s valuable to have a portfolio. 

What’s the best part of being a food and drinks photographer?

Probably the eating—it’s definitely the best part of my job. I also think that it’s so fun to chat with chefs and restaurant owners, so that’s also always a highlight. 

Want more food photography fun? Check out these strange yet effective tips and tricks used by commercial food photographers to make everything look tastier.

The post Food and drink photographer Louise Palmberg makes images good enough to eat appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Food photography is one of the most popular things you can do with a camera at the moment. For October’s photo challenge, we requested that you, our talented readers, turn your cameras toward your plates to create new pieces of art from culinary masterpieces.

The results are a lot more beautiful than most of the food photos that are likely making their way through your Instagram feed at this very moment.

If you want to improve your own food photography skills, check out a few of our informative articles:

Tips From a Pro: Shoot Better Food Photos With Any Camera

The Etiquette of Food Photography

Quick Tip: Find the Best Light for Food Photography

Behind the Scenes: The Photography of Modernist Cuisine

Cranberry Beans Undressing

Skirt Steak Sandwich

Watermelon Wrapping

Oops!

The post October Photo Challenge Finalists: Food Photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Amy Kellner, a photo editor at The New York Times Magazine, says it was old box of Betty Crocker recipe cards that inspired her idea for the wacky, technicolor Jello salad that graces the Magazine’s food issue this week.

“I brought [the recipe cards] in on a whim, thinking ‘No way is this going to fly—everyone here is way too classy,'” Kellner says. “It just seemed quintessential—salads in aspic—the whole aesthetic is so lost.” When she shared the ridiculous box of recipe cards with Kathy Ryan, the Magazine’s Director of Photography, the feedback was instantly positive.

Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, a Milan-based duo, were hired to execute the eccentric idea. Kellner made a select of approximately 50 of her favorite dishes, scanned and emailed the cards to the two photographers.

“We gave them a lot to chose from,” Kellner says. “They could do pretty much whatever they wanted, but they had to make the recipe.” Cattelan and Ferrari added extra touches of absurdity as they worked—shrimp head fingers, a gold lobster, a hot dog for stirring coffee and a lit sparkler to top the Jello salad monstrosity. “That looks so awesome, the way it’s exploding over The New York Times Magazine logo,” Kellner says.

Although the food featured on the cover and in the pages of the Magazine looks shockingly artificial, especially in the “farm-to-table” age in which we currently live, according to Kellner everything for the shoot was 100 percent real. “We don’t fake food. We make the real recipe,” she says. “All the food we shoot has to be real because we’re a news publication.”

Unfortunately Kellner wasn’t on-hand to try any of theses atomic-age recipes, but says the photographers did sample the dishes. “They said they tried everything. They didn’t say much more about it,” she says. “But I’m sure it’s delicious.”

The post Food Photography Like You’ve Never Seen appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Instafood

Adam Goldberg never expected to be taking mobile photos of his food, but now, like many Instagram enthusiasts he can’t imagine not doing it.

“I almost consider my iPhone a camera that has a phone function, rather than a phone that has a camera function,” he says.

Goldberg is the man behind the @alifewortheating Instagram feed, and with 330,355 followers and a newly launched mobile food photography class on Skillshare, we wanted to pick his brain about how to take a food photo that is worth sharing.

What are some common mistakes you see people making when shooting their meals for sharing on Instagram?

Anything shot using a flash. There is something about flash and food that just makes the food look like an autopsy report. I think some people also get too close. When you get too close to food it doesn’t look appealing. It looks like a science experiment. I’ll try to step back a little bit, really try to put the food in the context where it is being experienced in the restaurant. I will [also] almost never put a filter on food, because it tends to skew the colors and the tones in an unappealing way. There is nothing appealing about a spinach salad having a red tint to it because you put on a vintage filter.

In your opinion what are the key elements to good food photos on Instagram?

The most important elements are really lighting and composition. When you are taking a mobile photo, you really have to make sure that the environment you are in has great lighting. If I’m in a restaurant one of the first things that I’ll do is ask if I can sit by the window or sit outside. With food, the colors have to be right or it doesn’t look like something you would want to eat.

People are sort of hardwired to either like or dislike a food depending on how it looks. Great lighting will bring out the natural colors. If it’s something that we’re used to and the colors don’t look like what we’ve previously experienced, it doesn’t look right. You would not want to have a hot dog that is blue. You have these preconceived notions that a hot dog should be red.

Almond Flour Pancakes. Photo: Adam Goldberg

What is your ideal light situation for shooting food?

The ideal lighting situation for a dish is a cloudy day outside. There are no shadows, just really crisp white light.

How does environment play into your food photos?

There is something special about food that it kind of brings people together and that is something that I try to incorporate in my photos. It’s the way that food makes people interact with each other that makes it sort of interesting. By putting in this human element, a hand or a person, even holding a cup of coffee and seeing two feet in the background, it makes it a bit more approachable.

You mentioned that you never use filters on a food shot, what editing apps do you like to use before posting?

Once I have like 10-15 shots I’ll kind of flip through them and I’ll open them up in Snapseed. Snapseed is an awesome editing app, you can use touch gestures to adjust to a very careful degree different aspects of the photo: the brightness, saturation, contrast, and sharpness. I’ll crop it in Snapseed, I’ll rotate it. I’ll do all the major adjustments there.

What are your favorite foods or meals to photograph?

Either breakfast or lunch because lighting tends to be a lot better earlier in the day. I love shooting coffee, but it’s hard to find unique shots of the same drink everyday. Generally food that has structure to it tends to come out a little bit better.

Check out Adam Goldberg’s Skillshare class on mobile food shooting here.

_Goldberg’s class is one of three food-focused courses being offered this fall by Skillshare. Julie Lee’s Food Photography: Styling Photo Collages launches Oct. 14 and Marte Marie Forsberg’s Lifestyle Photography: Capturing People, Flavors, Conversation launches on Dec. 16. _

Budin

Killen’s BBQ

Ceviche

La Camaronera

Propeller Coffee

Glasserie

The post How to Take Better Breakfast Pictures for Instagram appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Great food photography whets appetites, sells magazines, and inspires people to cook. But the imagery of the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks does more: It teaches, with plenty of aesthetic impact, too. Now find out how they do it. Click here to order The Photography of Modernist Cuisine

Nathan Myhrvold had a problem. In 2011, this true renaissance man and his co-workers at The Cooking Lab in Bellevue, WA, were preparing to publish their groundbreaking 2,400-page, six-volume, $600 Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The book’s futuristic recipes included revolutionary cooking techniques such as spherification and sous-vide—not what you would find in Fannie Farmer. In fact, both the recipes and their preparations can be downright daunting.

His problem? How to draw the casual reader into the books and not scare them off. To solve this, he created a new kind of food photography that piques curiosity at first glance, and then educates at the second. “If you represent a subject so that people can’t quite place it,” he explains, “that automatically draws them into the photo, and, we hope, will hook them into wanting to learn more about the science of food and new cooking techniques.”

Before Modernist Cuisine, the primary purpose of food photography was to make food look mouth-watering or otherwise inviting to eat: a steaming, perfectly browned and seasoned turkey on a Thanksgiving table, or a classic cherry pie on a checkered-cloth picnic table, with the sun-dappled cherry orchard beyond. These images, Myhrvold says, are more about nostalgia and romance than cooking.

So what distinguishes Modernist Cuisine photography from conventional food and cooking imagery? For starters, very few of the images showcase cooked food or finished dishes. The focus is always on cooking technique and ingredients, with backgrounds either pure white or black and totally context-free.

You don’t need a cookbook to tell you that food can be delicious, Myhrvold maintains. That’s a given; we know that. The Modernist approach to cooking and food photography is strictly about how to cook, not why.

This new, admittedly clinical style of food photography has been exhibited in museums from France to Hong Kong to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. It has drawn enough admirers that The Cooking Lab has published a new book specifically about its imagery: The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. Due in stores as you read this, it’s billed as the first coffee-table-scaled art book about food and cooking. Myhrvold is its chief photographer and author.

The 13-pound, $120 tome has two purposes: To inspire with unique and unusual fine-art food photography, and to explain to interested readers how the images were made. The explanations appear in the form of studio set-up shots and detailed captions found in the back of the book.

Myhrvold and his crew refuse to focus on the obvious, conventional, or clichéd. The book’s cover, for example, is a tight close-up of a tomato that explores with a sharply focused eye the red fruit’s skin and the graphically intriguing design of its stem and calyx. A more unsettling example: A photo in a section on the cooking of pork doesn’t show a beautiful browned and sweating pork chop. Instead, we see colorful, but squirmy photomicrographs of the parasitic worm that causes trichinosis. That’s what Myhrvold means by the “science of cooking” and what distinguishes his aesthetic from that of Martha Stewart or Ina Garten.

“After poring over hundreds of examples, we discovered something funny about food books,” says Myhrvold. “The cookbooks with beautiful images never reveal how their images were made, and the how-to photography books explain ways of shooting food, but their pictures are rarely beautiful or inspiring.”

The Photography of Modernist Cuisine tries to fix this with a satisfying mix of compelling food images and informative how-to. And it succeeds. It’s by far the most edifying and inspiring how-to book on food photography we’ve seen.

Just as the Modernist cooking techniques are cutting edge, so are the photo techniques employed by Myhrvold and his co-photographers. Modernist Cuisine photographers, for example, shoot food at drastically different scales than do typical cookbooks. They shoot the usual studio photographs, with standard lenses and lighting, but they go deeper, too, using macro, super-macro, and even microscopic views. Their super close-ups are presented usually with absolute sharpness thanks to focus stacking during postproduction—again, not something you will find in most food books.

Other advanced photographic techniques include stitched panoramics of food. Their high-speed photography is made possible by both high-frame-rate video cameras such as Visual Research’s Phantom, as well as short-flash-duration studio strobes. Such layered foods as sandwiches are carefully photographed to simulate exploded diagrams, with each ingredient its own layer, shot from slightly different angles.

Nathan Myhrvold is the conceptual force and financial backer for both The Cooking Lab and Modernist Cuisine. Interested in both photography and cooking from his young teens, he was sidetracked professionally but never let go of his culinary passion in the intervening years: He was Microsoft’s chief technology officer and founder of Microsoft Research—a 14-year relationship—from which he took an extended sabbatical in order to acquire a cooking diploma from the well-known French culinary institute in Paris, La Varenne. Asked for suggestions he might offer novice food photographers, Myhrvold says: “Start by finding available-light situations that speak to you. Several pictures in the book, in fact, were taken at open-air farmers’ markets with very simple equipment. Shoot in open shade or filtered light, perhaps using a simple reflector or slight application of flash to open up shadows.”

What about gear? “A serious 1:1 macro lens is nice, but not essential,” he continues. “The most-used lens for this book was the Canon 24­–105mm f/4L [which magnifies only to 1:4.3], because 1:1-type magnification can be too much. It puts your camera close enough to the subject that you’re often blocking your lights.”

As for skills, “develop the ability to compose and light ingredients so you accurately capture their shape, color, and texture,” he advises. Next, move on to small, off-camera shoe-mount flashes and then graduate to studio strobes. “The most important thing to learn about lighting food is not to shine your lights directly at your subjects. Instead, place your lighting so it reflects obliquely off the food’s surfaces.”

Best part of food photography? When you’re finished shooting, you can eat your subjects.

Shooting on Black: One of the studio setups shown in myhrvold’s book, this one is for subjects on black backgrounds. Photo: Chris Hoover/Modernist Cuisine LLC

A. Background
“A yard or two of black velvet from a fabric store makes a fantastic black background that reflects almost no light,” says Myhrvold. “Just make sure you keep your light sources’ output from spilling onto it.”

B. Tabletop
For sexy reflections on a black foreground, use a sheet of black Plexiglas as shown here. For more mirror-like effects, Myhrvold recommends a sheet of glass whose reverse side you’ve spray-painted black.

C. Lights
“When shooting translucent food like this grapefruit, it’s fun to light it from behind,” says Myhrvold. “In microscopy, they call this ‘dark field shooting,’ and for translucent subjects, the light should be hard [no softbox or diffuser] and typically come from the back and at an angle. This technique is frequently used for glass subjects.”

D. Computer station
Myhrvold recommends shooting tethered to a nearby computer. “We love the immediacy of it. You can tweak your lighting in real time, and know when you’ve got the shot. The way you look through a viewfinder is fundamentally different than the way you see with a computer screen.” And in the end, there will be far fewer unpleasant surprises.

As It Cooks

Focus Stacking

Thrown Food

Levitating Food

Enzyme Peel

The Photography of the Modernist Cuisine

The post Behind the Scenes: The Photography of Modernist Cuisine appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Great food photography whets appetites, sells magazines, and inspires people to cook. But the imagery of the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks does more: It teaches, with plenty of aesthetic impact, too. Now find out how they do it.

Nathan Myhrvold had a problem. In 2011, this true renaissance man and his co-workers at The Cooking Lab in Bellevue, WA, were preparing to publish their groundbreaking 2,400-page, six-volume, $600 Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The book’s futuristic recipes included revolutionary cooking techniques such as spherification and sous-vide—not what you would find in Fannie Farmer. In fact, both the recipes and their preparations can be downright daunting.

His problem? How to draw the casual reader into the books and not scare them off. To solve this, he created a new kind of food photography that piques curiosity at first glance, and then educates at the second. “If you represent a subject so that people can’t quite place it,” he explains, “that automatically draws them into the photo, and, we hope, will hook them into wanting to learn more about the science of food and new cooking techniques.”

Before Modernist Cuisine, the primary purpose of food photography was to make food look mouth-watering or otherwise inviting to eat: a steaming, perfectly browned and seasoned turkey on a Thanksgiving table, or a classic cherry pie on a checkered-cloth picnic table, with the sun-dappled cherry orchard beyond. These images, Myhrvold says, are more about nostalgia and romance than cooking.

So what distinguishes Modernist Cuisine photography from conventional food and cooking imagery? For starters, very few of the images showcase cooked food or finished dishes. The focus is always on cooking technique and ingredients, with backgrounds either pure white or black and totally context-free.

You don’t need a cookbook to tell you that food can be delicious, Myhrvold maintains. That’s a given; we know that. The Modernist approach to cooking and food photography is strictly about how to cook, not why.

This new, admittedly clinical style of food photography has been exhibited in museums from France to Hong Kong to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. It has drawn enough admirers that The Cooking Lab has published a new book specifically about its imagery: The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. Due in stores as you read this, it’s billed as the first coffee-table-scaled art book about food and cooking. Myhrvold is its chief photographer and author.

The 13-pound, $120 tome has two purposes: To inspire with unique and unusual fine-art food photography, and to explain to interested readers how the images were made. The explanations appear in the form of studio set-up shots and detailed captions found in the back of the book.

Myhrvold and his crew refuse to focus on the obvious, conventional, or clichéd. The book’s cover, for example, is a tight close-up of a tomato that explores with a sharply focused eye the red fruit’s skin and the graphically intriguing design of its stem and calyx. A more unsettling example: A photo in a section on the cooking of pork doesn’t show a beautiful browned and sweating pork chop. Instead, we see colorful, but squirmy photomicrographs of the parasitic worm that causes trichinosis. That’s what Myhrvold means by the “science of cooking” and what distinguishes his aesthetic from that of Martha Stewart or Ina Garten.

“After poring over hundreds of examples, we discovered something funny about food books,” says Myhrvold. “The cookbooks with beautiful images never reveal how their images were made, and the how-to photography books explain ways of shooting food, but their pictures are rarely beautiful or inspiring.”

The Photography of Modernist Cuisine tries to fix this with a satisfying mix of compelling food images and informative how-to. And it succeeds. It’s by far the most edifying and inspiring how-to book on food photography we’ve seen.

Just as the Modernist cooking techniques are cutting edge, so are the photo techniques employed by Myhrvold and his co-photographers. Modernist Cuisine photographers, for example, shoot food at drastically different scales than do typical cookbooks. They shoot the usual studio photographs, with standard lenses and lighting, but they go deeper, too, using macro, super-macro, and even microscopic views. Their super close-ups are presented usually with absolute sharpness thanks to focus stacking during postproduction—again, not something you will find in most food books.

Other advanced photographic techniques include stitched panoramics of food. Their high-speed photography is made possible by both high-frame-rate video cameras such as Visual Research’s Phantom, as well as short-flash-duration studio strobes. Such layered foods as sandwiches are carefully photographed to simulate exploded diagrams, with each ingredient its own layer, shot from slightly different angles.

Nathan Myhrvold is the conceptual force and financial backer for both The Cooking Lab and Modernist Cuisine. Interested in both photography and cooking from his young teens, he was sidetracked professionally but never let go of his culinary passion in the intervening years: He was Microsoft’s chief technology officer and founder of Microsoft Research—a 14-year relationship—from which he took an extended sabbatical in order to acquire a cooking diploma from the well-known French culinary institute in Paris, La Varenne. Asked for suggestions he might offer novice food photographers, Myhrvold says: “Start by finding available-light situations that speak to you. Several pictures in the book, in fact, were taken at open-air farmers’ markets with very simple equipment. Shoot in open shade or filtered light, perhaps using a simple reflector or slight application of flash to open up shadows.”

What about gear? “A serious 1:1 macro lens is nice, but not essential,” he continues. “The most-used lens for this book was the Canon 24­–105mm f/4L [which magnifies only to 1:4.3], because 1:1-type magnification can be too much. It puts your camera close enough to the subject that you’re often blocking your lights.”

As for skills, “develop the ability to compose and light ingredients so you accurately capture their shape, color, and texture,” he advises. Next, move on to small, off-camera shoe-mount flashes and then graduate to studio strobes. “The most important thing to learn about lighting food is not to shine your lights directly at your subjects. Instead, place your lighting so it reflects obliquely off the food’s surfaces.”

Best part of food photography? When you’re finished shooting, you can eat your subjects.

Shooting on Black: One of the studio setups shown in myhrvold’s book, this one is for subjects on black backgrounds. Photo: Chris Hoover/Modernist Cuisine LLC

A. Background
“A yard or two of black velvet from a fabric store makes a fantastic black background that reflects almost no light,” says Myhrvold. “Just make sure you keep your light sources’ output from spilling onto it.”

B. Tabletop
For sexy reflections on a black foreground, use a sheet of black Plexiglas as shown here. For more mirror-like effects, Myhrvold recommends a sheet of glass whose reverse side you’ve spray-painted black.

C. Lights
“When shooting translucent food like this grapefruit, it’s fun to light it from behind,” says Myhrvold. “In microscopy, they call this ‘dark field shooting,’ and for translucent subjects, the light should be hard [no softbox or diffuser] and typically come from the back and at an angle. This technique is frequently used for glass subjects.”

D. Computer station
Myhrvold recommends shooting tethered to a nearby computer. “We love the immediacy of it. You can tweak your lighting in real time, and know when you’ve got the shot. The way you look through a viewfinder is fundamentally different than the way you see with a computer screen.” And in the end, there will be far fewer unpleasant surprises.

As It Cooks

Focus Stacking

Thrown Food

Levitating Food

Enzyme Peel

The Photography of the Modernist Cuisine

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Fabulous Food

Fabulous Food

Fabulous Food

Fabulous Food

Fabulous Food

**Your pictures are making me hungry. How do you do that with images? **

The recipe is number one. My job is to make my subjects look amazing, and it helps if I start with a great recipe and great looking food. But if the recipe isn’t working, then my lighting and props can come to the rescue. Props are especially important when I am shooting an unexceptional recipe—showing a table that looks like someone really set it, or including a bit of a dish makes the food look better. Good composition helps, too.

How do you plan 
your compositions?

If you want your photograph to be all about the food and the recipe, overhead angles work well. A table setting with a straight-on perspective focuses more on the mood, inviting 
people to sit down and eat. Certain angles are better for some foods. A three-quarter angle, for example, always works for lasagna because you see the layers and a little bit of the top…

**How do you prepare 
for a shoot? **

While the food stylist is cooking, I test the composition and lighting with props. Timing is very important: If the food looks cold, then it doesn’t look tasty, so food always comes at the 
last minute. Preparation takes 
a very long time but the shooting itself is really fast.

Who else do you work with?

On set we have a food stylist and a prop stylist who handles the dishes and background. We’re always working together. Before the shoot we have an idea, and we also discuss with the clients what they want. I imagine 
from my side how to present that, and on set I direct the 
overall process and work with the prop stylist on different 
possibilities and arrangements.

What gear do you use?

I shoot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a 90mm f/2.8 Canon TS-E tilt-shift lens and also a zoom lens, a 24–105mm f/4L Canon EF IS. I like using natural light, but if the situation isn’t working—if there’s no window or the weather’s bad—then I use two Profoto Pro-8a 2400 power packs and sometimes two or three ProHead Plus light heads with sheer on the heads. I only use more than two light heads when shooting a big table setting with at least five dishes and a big background.

Before a shoot, I check the weather frequently and decide whether I’ll use daylight or strobes. But sometimes it depends on the job: If you have eight or ten dishes, artificial light is faster than using window light, which changes and can keep things from looking consistent.

How do you decide on your aperture?

It depends what the project is for. Cookbook pictures serve to bring attention to the food and the recipe, so when I’m shooting for a cookbook, a shallow depth of field allows me to home in on certain aspects of the dish and let most of the background go out of focus. For magazine photographs, it’s usually all about telling a story with props and styling too, so there I’ll use a deeper depth of field.

What’s your postproduction process like?

I use Phase One Capture One 6, and sometimes I’ll fix color a little bit, but I don’t really do anything crazy. I try to make it look very natural, but if it doesn’t look good the client, the magazine staff, or I have to retouch.

What changes when you’re shooting beverages?

Timing is important here too—ice melts in the glass, and with beer you have to get the great foam on top. I prepare more for beer than anything else. I test without it for composition and lighting to get ready, and then I shoot quickly.

I also control the reflection in the glass. When I use window light, I put sheer in front of the window to soften the reflection, and cover the other side with a foam core board so that the glass doesn’t reflect anything else on set. I also get down when I shoot—I don’t want to see myself in the glass.

Some of your photos 
have styling that looks slapdash. Do you like that?

Yes, I like food that looks natural. Food photography follows trends, and these days it’s all about organic and healthy. Ten or fifteen years ago the food was perfectly styled and lit—it looked a bit artificial. But now it’s more natural, even a little messy: a napkin that’s not perfectly folded, crumbs on the table, a beer with a little bit of overflow. Viewers like that kind of thing because it happens on their own tables too.

What differences are there between your editorial and commercial work?

Editorial people love friendly looking photos; shooting for magazines is more free, more creative—happy accidents are a good thing. But catalogs and advertising are totally different. I did Boar’s Head, the ham, and it’s just one shot with the sandwich all day. They make it different with more ham or different lighting, but it’s just one shot from like 9 a.m. to 
8 p.m. It’s all about the simple shot. No props, or minimal props.

What tips would you 
give for shooting food 
for the first time?

Photography is all about lighting. No matter what kind of subject, if you have good lighting, everything looks better. So try to find good light: I like high-contrast lighting, but some prefer flat, soft lighting. It’s a matter of personal taste, but you must learn how light works with your subject and how to control it to make the food look delicious. And think about the food before you shoot: the recipe, the color, and even the dishes. Find something charming about your subject, even if it’s just pasta.

What’s the most 
difficult food to shoot?

Lasagna! A food stylist once told me that making a good-looking lasagna is especially hard because there are many layers, which are not too charming or colorful, and the top is flat and unattractive. Plus, once you cut it, it gets messed up quickly.

**Styling 101 **

We asked Paul Grimes, a food stylist who works frequently with Kim on her shoots, to share some tips for making your grub look its best.

**Prepare: **Get the lighting and props ready before the food arrives on set. The idea is to capture the life of what you’re shooting; freshness will give you a right-out-of-the-oven look.

Think like an artist: Use your knowledge of color. If there are multiple items on a plate, consider how their colors and textures interact. Think of the plate as a blank canvas and the food as your paint.

Consider your plating: Though chefs may be trained to set the protein closest to the diner, you can bend that rule for aesthetic reasons. Plating can also depend on what you’re selling: If you’re making a picture for a chicken company, then make the chicken the star. Most of the time, though, simply think of the plate as an ensemble and try to make everything look good.

**Understand the food****: ** 
This takes practice and experience. Pasta, for instance, absorbs sauce, so you may need to add more as you shoot. Think about the relationship of the food to the set as well: If something is standing up, will it block the light source or create strange shadows?

**Stay flexible: **You’re trying to capture the lively aspect of a food, so even if ice cream melts, go with it—that’s what ice cream does.

Yunhee Kim came to New York City after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology and began her career as a photo assistant. Her love of cooking and eating cemented her commitment to food shooting.

The post Tips From a Pro: Shoot Better Food Photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Tomato Basil icon

Looking for a new still life project? Try shooting raw fruits or vegetables. They’re readily available, can be beautiful, cost little, and—unlike cooked or frozen food—they can hold their shape, color, and attractiveness for days or even weeks at a time. And you can still eat them when the shoot is over.

“The best food photography starts with the subject itself,” says Sue Tallon, the San Francisco-based pro who shot this tomato with basil. “I didn’t decide one day that I wanted to shoot a cool picture of a tomato. Instead, I saw the tomato and more importantly its wonderful, wiry stems and knew immediately that I had to photograph it.”

The takeaway? Don’t start your still life project until you’re inspired by a subject with the right combination of form, color, and character. Find a fruit or vegetable that you want to immortalize, and you’re ready to start. “If you’re new to still life photography, I suggest that you keep it simple,” says Tallon. “Focus on beautiful things and don’t clutter the image with unimportant objects. Pick a simple subject and let everything else in the shot fall away.”

Looking for a new still life project? Try shooting raw fruits or vegetables. They’re readily available, can be beautiful, cost little, and—unlike cooked or frozen food—they can hold their shape, color, and attractiveness for days or even weeks at a time. And you can still eat them when the shoot is over.

“The best food photography starts with the subject itself,” says Sue Tallon, the San Francisco-based pro who shot this tomato with basil. “I didn’t decide one day that I wanted to shoot a cool picture of a tomato. Instead, I saw the tomato and more importantly its wonderful, wiry stems and knew immediately that I had to photograph it.”

The takeaway? Don’t start your still life project until you’re inspired by a subject with the right combination of form, color, and character. Find a fruit or vegetable that you want to immortalize, and you’re ready to start. “If you’re new to still life photography, I suggest that you keep it simple,” says Tallon. “Focus on beautiful things and don’t clutter the image with unimportant objects. Pick a simple subject and let everything else in the shot fall away.”

Also, pay attention to your lighting, says Tallon. “Light your food to produce nice reflections off its shiny surfaces.” Light from above to help suggest your subject’s shape. “Use window light at first to get the hang of what makes beautiful light. Then figure out what mood you want: dark and moody with deep soft shadows, or bright and blown out with washed out highlights and very open shadow areas. You have to learn how to recognize beautiful light before you can make it,” says the photographer.

Step 1

Source your subjects. Visit the best food markets and look long and hard for the right specimens. “Some fruits and vegetables have real personality or something that feels particularly interesting,” says Tallon. “That’s what you’re looking for. This tomato had a voluptuous shape and more importantly that beautiful stem! It reminded me of a Tim Burton character—all wiry and awkward.”

Step 2

Gather your gear. Almost any DSLR or ILC and macro lens will do. To add a flattering sense of compression, use a 100mm or 180mm macro. If you want to exaggerate the roundness of a fruit or vegetable, a wider macro (i.e., 60mm) will do the trick.

Step 3

Build your set. Place the camera so you’re shooting straight into the subject. As for lighting, simple window lighting will often work. Tallon, however, placed a strobe light in a softbox above the tomato to produce the white reflections, a back light to brighten the white background, and two fill lights in front to lighten shadows. “Unless you want to convey a dark or mysterious look, avoid dark shadows,” she says.

Step 4

Finesse your setup. Tallon didn’t want the tomato to appear to be floating freely in space, but needed it to appear anchored to a surface. To give it that anchored feeling, she created reflections underneath the tomato with the help of a sheet of clear, highly reflective Plexiglas placed on her white tabletop.

Final Step

Set exposure, shoot, then edit. Tallon wanted a fully sharp subject from front to back and so set a minimum lens aperture (f/22) for the shot. After shooting, she took her tomato into Adobe Photoshop CS6. “Postproduction was all about cleaning up the white background to make it pure white with no detail and removing any dust, marks, or distracting details from my subject, while slightly pumping up its color and impact,” says Tallon.

The Gear

Canon EOS-1D X: Tallon originally shot with the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II (since replaced by the 1D X). Its 16.7MP sensor captured all the detail she needed for her vegetable still life. $5,300, street

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM macro: “I positioned the lens so that I was shooting straight into the subject for an iconic point of view” says Tallon. $800, street

The post How-To: Photograph Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Against a White Background appeared first on Popular Photography.

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I am very opinionated about how food should be. When I see a cut of meat, for example, I know if it’s right. I never plan out exactly what I’m going to do; it just happens. It’s the same when I set up a photograph. You touch things, you move things, change the light and the angle, and all of a sudden it all comes together—and that’s what it is. That’s it. How I get there and why, I don’t know.

My way of working is different from other food photographers. In Sweden I attended culinary school and then worked my way up from dish­washer to executive chef. Then I got an offer to work at Aquavit in New York with Marcus Samuelsson. I’d never lived outside Sweden, so I took the chance and moved to the U.S. on an 18-month contract. But I’d always been interested in art, and the older I got, the more I got into painting and drawing. I started taking art classes full-time at LaGuardia Community College and working at restaurants nights and weekends. At the same time, I was getting burnt out on the restaurant business. It’s a hard lifestyle. So I decided to take a leap, quit cooking, and stay in school for fine art. I was in my late twenties, and I just took a wild chance. I stopped cooking professionally around 2000.

When I started out, I didn’t want to do food photography. I’ve always collected cookbooks and I read food magazines, because they give me inspiration for cooking and I like the information. I never really liked the pictures, though. As an assistant to other photographers I worked on everything from fashion to interiors to catalogs. Every now and then there would be some kind of food in a shot—half-eaten chocolate cake or something. I worked for a few food photographers, but I couldn’t stand the way they thought about food, the way the food stylist dealt with the food, the way it was photographed. This was the early days, 10 years ago and more. Everything looked very different then. So I didn’t want to shoot food and I didn’t shoot food. I shot portraits; I shot still lifes.

For most of the food shoots I assisted on, things were pretty. The photographers were shooting backlit, with a very shallow depth of field—everything was perfect. I didn’t want to deal with it. Even today I never get hired to do a pretty salad story. I usually get the ugly stories—the food that’s not so photogenic, that’s usually what I get hired to shoot. I don’t mind. I don’t like pretty things.

One of the first guys to hire me, in 2006, was Richard Ferretti at Gourmet. An approach of his was to hire photographers who had never really photographed food before. He wanted people who weren’t pre-editing in their heads: “OK, this is how I have to shoot because I’m shooting for Gourmet, or this I have to shoot because I’m shooting for Martha Stewart Living.” He asked me for a 10-page feature. At first I thought he was joking because I had never done a food job in my life. I figured he’d never hire me again, so I just shot how I thought it should be. It was so much fun to do, and the magazine really liked what I did. That’s when I realized I didn’t have to shoot food the way everyone else was doing it.

Art Imitates Life

I like my photographs to be spontaneous. Ideally, I like to just see things in the world, whether traveling or at home or in the studio, and take a snapshot and that’s it. I want an honest picture.

That’s how the above image happened. I was in Italy early last year and I had this amazing meal at a restaurant in Rome, in the historic Jewish ghetto. When I left the restaurant, I took a snapshot of our table with my little digital camera. I’m friends with Gather Journal‘s founder and creative director, Michele Outland, so when I got back I pitched the story to her. I said, “I want to re-create this picture in a studio or something. Let’s make it massive and really sexy and nice.” It just happened to fit in well with one of the themes they had planned, which was “Traces.”

And that’s what we did. All of us sat down and had lunch. It was Michele and me, and the food stylist Maggie Ruggiero and prop stylist Theo Vamvounakis—it’s her apartment, her props. I had my assistant and some other people. We ate carbonara and sardines and bread and wine, then they all left the table and I took the picture (I moved a few things around a little first). We set up the other shots in the feature in a similar manner. What do you do before dinner? You sit down and smoke cigarettes, have a cocktail, eat nuts. So we did that too. We also did a dessert moment with coffee, grappa, and an empty plate.

Now, projects like this aren’t just having fun and putting on dinner parties. I try different approaches technically to challenge myself. So for Gather I found the first camera I ever got, an old Nikon FM2 35mm film camera, and I told myself, “I’m going to shoot this whole thing with this camera and I’m not going to use a tripod”—the exact opposite of what I usually do. I couldn’t see what I was shooting. Then, I took the film to a Chinese guy in the East Village to one-hour process some plates and I got these four-by-six prints, like we used to get back in the day. The colors aren’t right, there’s no detail, but that was the whole idea. I used those little four-by-six prints as finals for the magazine. They are very intimate.

Usually it doesn’t work that way—most of my photos are set up—but I still want them to look just like something is really going on. I pretend that I’m walking into this restaurant, or this cafe or someone’s home or whatever, and I just saw this and took a picture. I want you to feel the experience of the meal or of preparing it. That’s the whole idea—it’s not just a picture of someone’s untouched plate.

Unfortunately, more and more magazines are not taking risks, not being as creative as they used to be. I guess they have to sell the magazine and so may be reluctant to get too weird. But meanwhile, smaller magazines are coming in, and because they’re independent they can do whatever they want. Gather Journal is one; Swallow Magazine is another. That’s where I get my creative outlet.

A Hands-On Approach

When I’m on a job, I always touch the food myself. I haven’t worked much with food stylists. There are only a couple that I really like to work with, and they know me very well. They’re the ones who let me get my hands in there and move the food and touch it, eat it, whatever is needed for a shot. One of my absolute favorites is Victoria Granof. She is the master. She can take you to another level, where there’s a story happening. She and I are very similar in that way.

We did “Guts of the Beast” together for Black Ink, the magazine published by American Express. That was colossal. Often, foods are shot in a pot, a pan, a plate, some sort of tray. I always try to take it to different places, but there’s only so much you can do with a plate of food. So I was starting to think, “OK, what if we just do something beautiful?” Then Black Ink called me up and said, “We’re doing an entire issue on food. We want you to shoot these Fergus Henderson recipes—and you can do whatever you want. You have complete freedom. You can pick your team and we want it to be different.” It was a dream assignment, and a chance to try something a little more conceptual.

Around 2007 I had started a personal project photographing animal parts as still lifes. I photographed sheep hearts and a few other pieces, in black and white and then later in color. For Black Ink I wanted to take it further, doing all the parts, the offal—really beautiful still lifes, but still slightly deconstructed. So instead of shooting a completed, cooked veal terrine, I made a still life with the ingredients—the brain, the cognac, and the seasonings. I kept the light very stark, with no real shadows, so that it almost feels as if you’re under a fluorescent light. It adds to a quality that’s a little bit clinical, a little bit sterile.

The pig’s ears and feet is one of my favorite photographs from this story. When you cook pig’s ear, there’s just a lot of skin and you have to shave it, just like you would shave your beard. Chef Henderson recommends in his recipe that you use a Bic shaver. Angharad Bailey, the prop stylist, brought a pink one just to make it different. And then the way the pig’s feet are crossed over, it’s very feminine. I think it’s very sexy.

It’s really difficult to work with food or with photography without getting into the experience or getting your hands a little dirty. I’ve always been fascinated by latex gloves in working with food, since in Europe no one really uses gloves. Here in the U.S. everyone in the kitchen wears them. Now it’s trendy to eat in a more conscious way, using the whole animal and getting to know the food—starting to take the gloves off in a way. It’s also trendy to shoot like I do, so a lot of my old pictures—the ugly, dirty ones where people said, “Yes, you’re never going to get any work shooting food”—now those are the ones I sell. —As told to Meg Ryan Heery

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