• Graphic Design

Unveiling Food Styling Photo Secrets

All about making food look delicious, velvety, and completely delightful applies to food styling. Food photographers are those prime creative heads who make the manifold scrumptious captures of the food within large-scale, beautiful images. They involve innovative yet sometimes completely unexpected and weird techniques to come out with top-notch concepts for food styling. Now we’ll bring you a list of some of those food photography handy tips and guidelines for taking a successful food styling photographs, so you could learn the tricks and tools employed to attain the desired food images. Let’s go ahead and reveal every trick of this trade.

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It is really important to have everything properly arranged. Set up all the stable props including plates, glasses, silverware, vase with flowers, all the items you need for a planned layout. Napkins, by the way, may be placed underneath the food, that will add some visual contrast separating the food from the top of the table.

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Talking about the perfect composition and how to achieve it, we should mention that it is vitally important to explore the food to find the most appropriate and beautiful angle. See where the food looks more appetizing. The shot should be preferably taken from above if you have a soup, salad, or something wet and glossy to be captured. That will reduce all the unnecessary reflections. And one more, give preference to simplicity and subtleties of the food displayed, it is always better to see elegance that is not overwhelmed.

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Lighting is also very essential item. Try using various lighting techniques to see how it is possible to make food more tempting. As for the food colors, they should be subdued and naturally lighted to emphasize healthy and organic food. When it comes to lightening drinks, for example, it’s better to use bottom light showed through the ice and the bottle or the grass. In such a way the drink will look cold, wet, and refreshing.

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Also use an adequate white space and clean background to let the food take center stage. Sometimes photographers resort to using the same color backdrop to sound balanced with the food presented.

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Have the meat barely cooked so it remained pretty rounded and glossy. You may use a blowtorch to cook the sides, create grill marks on meat, or melt cheese or butter. Heat guns may also be useful to design crusty edges. Other helpful things to adopt are brown shoe polish for browning, for instance the skin of chicken, and brown gravy base to varnish the dish.

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If you’re shooting a chocolate, you may use a hairdryer to very lightly melt the surface of it. Thus you’ll get rid of all the blemishes and when the chocolate has firmed up somewhat will have an even and shiny surface.

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As for the glycerin, it is a truly indispensable item for a proper food styling. This oily, clear liquid makes the food look wet, fresh, and shiny keeping it from a quick drying. It is good for meat, fish, cooked vegetables, cut fruits, and salads if sprayed. And since it does not evaporate, you may as well use glycerin mixed with some water for making long-lasting water drops.

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When it necessary to use steam for hot and appetizing look, photographers commonly fake it with soaked cotton balls microwaved and placed behind the dish to be shot.

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Sometimes there must be fake food used since an ice cream melts quickly, and whip cream may run. Photographers in this case add some thickener to the whipped cream, use white glue instead of milk, hand-carved acrylic instead of ice cubes, or machine oil replacing fast-running honey. Beverage may have some water added to them for a better transparency and backlight.

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More food styling photo tips:
– use cotton-tipped swabs to pick up crumbs or remove small liquid spills on plates;
– chopsticks and tweezers are the most used tools for moving and placing small food items;
– fruits and vegetables look juicier and fresher when sprayed with deodorant or waxed;
– use colored melted wax to imitate the trail of chocolate sauce on ice-cream and glue to assemble stubborn food items;
– use dulling spray on any reflective item to create a soft, even reflection without showing your photo equipment in the reflection.