Your Food is Ready for Its Closeup

Since I can't fit all of you into my kitchen when I'm whipping up some dish, I have to try to share it the best way I can. Since the last time I tried to e-mail an aroma did not work out, I have to take photos. Here are a few things I've learned along the way.

1) Shoot your food RAW. While you may indeed be taking a photo of uncooked ingredients, I meant to take a photo of your food in the RAW format if your camera can do it. RAW is an uncompressed format that basically saves the info from the sensor in your camera as is. It allows the photographer to fix a multitude of sins later without affecting the original image. You can always revert to the original without any ill effects. Every time you save a JPEG file, it degrades a little bit from the compression. Downsides to RAW files are that they are huge compared to a JPEG and you will have to convert it to a JPEG at some point if you want to share it.

2) Play with your camera. Without film processing costs hanging over one's head, digital photography lets one shoot with abandon. Just look at all the photos on Flickr, Picassa, etc. Feel free just to shoot at things you see around the house. Be sure to try all the controls on your camera and learn how they affect your photos. Play with natural light, flash, etc just to get comfortable with the effects. When taking a photos of your food, take a lot. You can just delete them if you are not happy with them.

3) Take off the training wheels. You can take great photos letting the camera do all the thinking. I take many photos this way myself. Learning how to set aperture, shutter speed, etc your self will open up new creative outlets for your shots. Aperture is especially important to food photography as it allows you to control how much of the dish is in focus. The larger your aperture(small f number), the less depth of focus. So if you want to concentrate on that perfect tomato in the front, open up that aperture and focus on the tomato. Done correctly, the background will be rendered in an agreeable blur. This blur is call bokeh in photo lingo.

4) Get up close and personal with your food. Taking a photo of the entire dish is great. However, sometimes just concentrating on one part of the dish makes a more compelling photo. You can choose to make a grill mark, the pooling of juices on the plate, or a bit of parsley garnish on top to be the focal point of your photo. Try shooting your food from different vantage points. Look for interesting angles that will make your food pop.

Taking photos of you food opens up an another creative channel in which you can express yourself. It's also lends a more lasting quality to something as ephemeral as food. Long after the dish is eaten and the dishes washed, you have a photographic souvenir of you deeds in the kitchen.