The Art of Food Photography, With Your Cellphone!

Want the world to know what’s cooking? Here are some tips on how to make the most out of your cellphone camera to take pictures of your meals.

Whether you love it or hate it, you just can’t ignore food photography. Cellphone food photography has gone beyond its leisurely Instagram origins and is now considered a serious genre of cellphone photography. So here are some tips on how to make images of your gastronomical adventures with your humble cellphone camera:

Experiment with Angles
The overhead shot often works well with food but it can get a bit monotonous, so don’t hesitate to try new angles and perspectives to capture the shot from. Also use macro mode to get closer to the food can capture many details and textures of the food to make it look even more delectable.

Don’t be afraid to get up close and personal with your dish. Use macro mode to put the ingrdients of your dish in the spotlight. Photograph/Aditya Nair

Filter Through The Filters
Instagram filters and apps with presets may work great on your human subjects, but it may not be the same story for your food.  Using dark filters like X Pro II may not help in making the cuisine look palatable, or even edible for that matter. So try to manually adjust the brightness and saturation of colours rather than using filters.

Let There be Natural Light
Food looks the best when it looks natural. Like human subjects, food also needs to look fresh and lively to be appealing, and an on-camera flash can do the same thing to food that it can do to live subjects, it can make it look haggard and wilted.

So during the daytime take a picture near a window and during the nighttime you can use candlelight. The dark yellow lighting ambiance of restaurants definitely doesn’t help food photography, so at times flash might become necessary. A tip in these cases would be to bounce light off a wall to your food to make the light on the food less harsh.

Adding a human element to your photographs can help you take your audience on a culinary journey. Photograph/Ambarin Afsar

Play With Your Food
Practically anyone can take pictures of food, make your food stand out by adding other components like cutlery, fruits, vegetables and other ingredients of the dish to incorporate interesting elements to the photograph. Also shoot on interesting textural surfaces like wood or marble to make the plate of food pop.

Adding a human element to your images can also transform your food photography from images of dishes to an experience. So make sure that your food photography doesn’t just have food, but that it’s about food and what it involves.

Don’t Be Intrusive

The most important thing about food photography is to have fun. So make sure that your photographs aren’t just about food, but about the joy of having food. Photograph/ Ambarin Afsar

While you should do everything to get a good shot, when it comes to places like restaurants don’t be an inconvenience by changing seats to get a better picture and don’t take too long just for the shot, especially when other diners are waiting for a seat; after all the best way to enjoy food is to eat it. This time, you can have your cake and eat it.