Food Photography

Though this is not a recipe, I thought that those of you who are interested in taking pictures of food (don't we all? I'm usually the first to whip out a camera at a restaurant when my meal arrives) might enjoy this post by The Pioneer Woman about how to take better photos of food.

In it, she gives 8 great tips on how to improve your food photography. Here is my take on it.

Her tip: Don't use flash
My take: Sometimes when you're in a dark restaurant or eating dinner outdoors when it's getting dark, there's only so much you can do. This was taken with flash, and it's not terrible. But yes, on the whole, i agree that using natural light is WAY better than the dinky flash.
Like this one :)

Her tip: Use Natural Light
My take: Of course! Sometimes i bring my dishes out onto the patio just to get a good shot of it.

Her tip: Use a Wide Aperture
My take: mm, why do you think i just bought my new lens? hehe, because it allows you to open up that aperture to f1.8 (=super big aperture) so you get in a lot of light AND allows of shallow depth of field. Though yes, using wide aperture does get you that nice blur in the background, but if you have your aperture too wide, you're only gonna get focused on a very tiny part of your food. Like this one.

The only part that's really in focus is the tip of that middle left strawberry. haha.

Her tip: Lighten the picture afterwards
My take: If you use photoshop, this is very easy to do. But i am poor and i don't have photoshop. So i use iPhoto cuz that's where i store all my photos. To do what I do, click on a picture you wanna brighten, selected Edit, then open Adjust, then under the sliding bar that says Exposure, move it a little to the right. Yay! That's it.

Her tip: Correct overly yellow photos
My take: Ch'ya, this happens like every time i take any pictures in dim lighting with high ISO. To correct for it in iPhoto, go to Edit, Adjust, then find the sliding bar that says Temperature, and move it a little to the left.

Her tip: Get close to the food
My take: No worries, i already do. I love taking detailed photos of the food because it allows for the textures to come out and then you can start smelling the food though the photo. Mm. But sometimes my camera has a hard time focusing on something that close. I often end up cropping the pictures later.

Her tip: Cut into the food
My take: I think by the time the food is done, i'm so hungry and eager to eat it that i forget to take pictures of me slicing into the food or serving it. This is the only photo i can think of that has a utensil in it.
It's worth thinking about though.

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Sorry about the non-food jibberish! I'll return to recipes again soon. :)