Improve Your Food Photography

Name: Improve Your Food Photography
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 1 each Mobile device

A great photo is key to getting your recipes all of the attention they deserve. But you don't have to be a pro photographer to make your food look awesome.

Ryan Goodwin @cook_3814251

San Francisco, California

A great photo is key to getting your recipes all of the attention they deserve. But you don't have to be a pro photographer to make your food look awesome.

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Ingredients

1 eachMobile device

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Steps

1

The easiest way to improve your food photography is to improve your light source. Natural light is best, so shoot outside or near a big window whenever possible.
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If you can't find enough natural light, use a desk lamp to supplement overhead lighting. If your desk lamp is too harsh, a sheet of white paper can be held between the light source and subject to diffuse the light.
3

To give you a better idea of how simple lighting adjustments can drastically improve your photos, I took the same shot with 3 different lighting arrangements.
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The first image was taken in my kitchen, using only existing overhead lighting.
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For this image, I brought in a cheap drop lamp I got at the hardware store.
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And for this image, I used a sheet of paper to diffuse the light from my lamp.
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Now you've got a pretty decent photo to share. Time to move on to editing. By cropping and applying some subtle filters, we can take a good image and make it stand out even more.
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Let's see if we can improve the photo below.
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I like to use a photo editing app called Aviary. It's easy to use and available on Android and IOS. For this photo, I just quickly applied Aviary's 'food' filter, listed under the enhance tab. Quite a difference, and it took about 10 seconds.
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There are many photo editing apps available with countless features, but I recommend keeping it simple. Please don't over edit images, and please avoid applying any clip art or framing to your images (sorry, I violated this suggestion with my cover photo here).
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A final tip. Take plenty of different shots at various angles. That way, you'll increase your chances of finding a base image with a great angle and crisp focus.