Blog: 5 Steps For Beginner Food Photographers
As a food photographer - I’m passionate about all things food, and telling stories through my photography. You can use these tips to kick-start your food photography journey.
Food photography is a creative way to share delicious recipes, promote restaurants, and showcase food-based products to the world. Using the right starter tools, lighting, and composition techniques, you can capture great food photography – even with a 10-year old camera! Learn how to become a food photographer in this quick guide for beginners.
1: Starter Camera Equipment.
A great place to start with food photography is investing in the right equipment, but with so many camera brands and cameras on the market, it’s hard to know where to start!
I’m a massive believer in the camera brand not being very important, and an even bigger advocate for buying used or refurbished camera equipment for food photography, or any other genre of photography. The reason behind this is that all of your favorite photos, and all historical photos were taken on ‘old cameras’, and a lot of what makes the images great, isn’t a fancy camera with lots of features, but a photographer who has an understanding of metering (settings) and an eye for composition.
Starting out in food photography, I would recommend a refurbished full-frame camera body like the Canon EOS 5D MKII at £169, and a 50mm prime lens, - either like the Sigma 50mm f.1,4 Art Lens or Canon 50mm f/1.4 at around £500/£174. This makes an amazing food photography camera and lens at around £340 - which is a steal and 10% of the cost of a new system.
The Canon 5D MKII was my first camera in 2012, and holds a special place in many a photographers’ hearts for being a solid workhorse camera that you can really throw around. When I compare it to my new 5DS R; other than a bigger sensor for commercials and a few fancy settings - they’re very much similar cameras, but with a £2,000 price difference (I still take my 5D MKII on holiday).
50mm lenses, or ‘Nifty Fiftys’ offer a great focal length that is slightly tighter than the field of view of your eyes, whilst offering a good all-around experience whilst you find your style. Encouraging interaction with your subject as opposed to zooming in from afar. I take my Sigma with me to every shoot, and use it for about 1/3 of my food photography work and 90% of my reportage photography.
Usually, the main investment for food photographers is in your glass (lenses), with camera bodies coming and going as they get beaten up, or in my case (the USB board gets damaged over time) - whereas your glass can stay with you for 10-20 years.
Lastly, invest in a solid tripod to hold your camera steady. This allows you to place your camera looking into a scene, and to make steady changes, without having to keep picking up and putting down your camera each time; seeing each change as it happens. It also allows you to set a lower shutter speed if needed, without adding any camera shake/blur.
I would recommend the Manfrotto 055xPROB and a three-way-head like the Manfrotto MHXPRO-3WG X. This tripod is rock steady, but not too heavy to carry with you, and the tripod head allows for smooth and steady adjustments to the panning and tilting - as opposed to ball-head tripods that most consumer tripods feature, which is really imprecise and can’t handle much weight.
For new food photographers or budding enthusiasts, I always reccomend this setup and if I were to start again - this is exactly what I’d go for.
2: Telling A Story: Props and Dishes.
Once I’ve got a spark of an idea, I like to quickly write it down and think what I’m trying to communicate in my food photography. Is the story a plate of lemony pasta on a summery afternoon, making it light and bright? Or are we wanting a neon-lite, Asian street food vibe - or are we going graphic with the food front and center?
Next it’s all about the colour and textures. What colours and hues would compliment the food, and the general feeling of the scene? If it’s Asian food like the above example, greens, and reds for props, or go classic white if Chinese; texture wise, a mixture of nice fabrics and in this case, bamboo mats will really do a great job of signaling to the viewer the feeling of the scene.
I’ll almost always start with what I feel the dish or cuisine represents cultrally, then work backwards from that; looking to the colours of the food, and picking out a primiary and secondairy colour for the colour scheme. Little elements like fabrics, dishes, and sprinkles of spare ingredients in the background really add visual texture to bolster the scene.
My food photography style is quite front and centre, so I tend to place the hero/subject of my food photography in clear view. When I’m placing in texture and visual aides to the composition, I use a couple of rules; a) making sure that any props placed in aren’t clashing with the clean lines of the hero, and b) if a prop is taller than the hero, it isn’t fully in frame, as not to distract from the dish.
3: Adjust Camera Settings for the Desired Effect.
Now we’ve covered cameras and props - its now down to adjusting your camera settings. This is one of the essential components for capturing amazing food photography, and a great place to start is in understanding camera settings and what they do.
In the simplest terms, all photos are made using the Exposure Triangle. Cambridge in Colour do a great in-depth article on this, and this was the original resource I used when I self-taught 12-years ago.
The Exposure Triangle covers, ISO (the sensitivity of your camera sensor), Aperture (the depth of a scene) and Shutter Speed (the locking of motion). Getting the right exposure is all about a balance of these three camera settings.
I’ll always start with the ISO, looking at how much light is in my scene. Building up from ISO100 (a great clean space to start), I’ll increase the number to a point where I’m satisfied that I can achieve my look. From there I’ll either look to my Shutter Speed or Aperture. As I’m usually on a tripod, I’ll go for Aperture; thinking how much depth I want in the scene, and how much of my out of focussed areas that I would like blurry and sort in the background - otherwise know as bokeh.
A lot of traditional food photography is very beginner friendly plays in the soft, out-of-focus bokeh realms, with the aperture set somewhere between f/2 and f3.2. More modern graphic food photography, like McDonald’s, Deliveroo, UberEats etc is shot at a higher/lower Aperture of f/16 - putting a lot of the frame in focus.
With your ISO and Aperture set to you creative style, you can now tweak the shutter speed up or down to set the desired exposure.
As a quick rule of thumb for starters, set your shutter speed to 1/125, aperture to f/2.8 and then starting at ISO 100, check to see what your exposure is looking like. If it’s too dark, put your ISO up to 125, 160 etc, until correctly lit. If it’s too bright because you’re outside, or next to a window; instead change the Shutter Speed to be faster, from 1/125 to 1/160, and onwards.
4: Food Photography Lighting
If you’re getting started in food photography, and find flash lighting a bit daunting, it’s totally understandable. Studio lighting, both flash and continous are super confusing for new food photographers, with there being so many ways to modify the lighting and loads of different lighting brands to start with.
The best place to start with food photography lighting for beginners is to use the free and abundant lighting from the sun - i.e natural light.
One good way to use natural light is by positioning your setup near a window - either with the light coming from behind if you’re shooting top down, or from the side if you want to show depth in your scene. Light coming from the side is my personal favourite as it adds sweeping contrast across the scene; showing a distinction between light and dark.
A quick food photography tip for your natural lighting is to turn off any lights in the room, to add more directionality to the window lighting and to avoid a mixture of different lighting tempurature colours. Daylight can be around 5000K (whiteish) where as house lighting can be around 3000K (orange/yellow). If you keep the house lights on, your shadows wont be defined and they’ll instead be filled with orange light which will confuse the feeling of the scene.
If the light coming through the widow is too strong because you’re in a south-facing room (north of the equator) - you can diffuse the lighting by placing something infront of the glass. For my work, I use diffusion paper, which is great, but expensive per meter - so for beginners, I would suggest bleached baking paper, a white shower curtain or a thin bed-sheet to diffuse the lighting. I’ll use a few strips of duct tape directly on the glass to stick it on there.
5: Practice Taking Photos Every Day.
The best way to improve your food photography skills is to practice taking photos every day. Well-known historical photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, 'Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst'; I think there is a lot of truth in that quote.
A big part of photography and why I work as a food photographer is that I’m very passionate about food and capturing it - both personally and for clients. Of course, there are some days and shoots that may not be your thing, but I really only do this as I love food photography and sharing it with people - both clients and their audience alike. I feel that it is important to keep that passion alive by working closely with my clients to develop their brand through my photography; making no one day the same.
The great news is, there’s a lot of information here and an amazing abundance on the web, so the best place to start is just by taking photos every day. Even if it’s just a quick snapshot of your breakfast, the more you practice, the better you will become over time.
Try different lighting setups, angles, and compositions to see what works best for different dishes. Don’t be afraid to experiment and make mistakes – that’s how you learn and grow as a food photographer, or in any genre of photography.
I hope this guide has been useful to those wanting to shoot more food photography, or one day want to be a food photographer.