Photographing of Food

Ingredients

The options for photographing food are endless; it's an incredibly visual subject. One thing to remember when starting out is that food photography is just like any other photography—the same principles of light, color, and composition apply.

In the case of the image above, I was prepping for a photograph on a cookbook shoot when I noticed the colorful ingredients for the next shot on the counter where the food stylist was working. We both realized that this was a photograph. The prop stylist, food stylist, and I then brainstormed ideas to create this image.

Photo Tip: When thinking about food photography, don’t just consider the finished product on the plate or the people eating it. Look at the ingredients—perhaps there’s a beautiful photograph waiting to be made.

Understand Aperture

The most fundamental element any photographer should understand is aperture. The aperture is the physical opening within your lens that allows light through to the sensor (or film in an older camera). The wider the aperture opening, the more light can pass through, and vice versa.

The size of the opening, which is regulated by a series of fins encroaching from the edge of the lens barrel, is measured in so-called f-stops, written f/2.8, f/5.9 and so on, with smaller numbers denoting wider apertures. If you find this inverse relationship tricky to remember, imagine instead that it relates not to the size of the hole but the amount of each fin encroaching into the opening.

A narrow opening is regulated by a large amount of each fin encroaching into the barrel, and so has a high f-stop number, such as f/16, f/18 and so on. A wide opening is characterised by a small number, such as f/3.2, with only a small amount of each fin obscuring the light.

Tips on Night Sky

Something wonderful has happened in photography: Ordinary people can now photograph the universe. Standing beneath the Milky Way has always been a beautiful sight, if you were lucky enough to find dark skies on a dark night. But the revelation of recent advances in digital photography is that the dim ribbon of silvery light we see with our naked eyes is actually a glorious, stupendous galaxy. For me the revelation came the first time I took a photograph of that galaxy and realized that just because the visible universe is so far away didn’t mean I needed a big telescope to photograph it. No, what I needed was a wide-angle lens because it is so huge—and we live in the middle of it. When I show young people my first published picture of the Milky Way I like to point out that this is their home. Earth lies about a third of the way out on one of those vast spiral arms of stars and dust clouds. Being able to take a snapshot of that universe is something new under the sun. And it’s great fun too.