What background should you photograph cakes against? Edible photography or how to photograph food correctly

When you see another delicious photo, the thought immediately arises that a horde of professionals worked on its creation. Everything looks like this:

But in fact, to create a beautiful and bright photo, you can get by with a more modest set. Approximately the same as in the following photo: table lamps, White background and backing. In most cases, you will need a tripod - the market offers budget and high-quality models for amateur photographers. So, let's get started with our review of articles and tutorials on the topic of food photography.

Composition and style– the fourth lesson for those who have mastered the previous three and want to experiment.

Food photography in detail

Steal like an artist - ideas, solutions, composition. Copy your favorite bloggers and one day you will find a unique style. To do this, study the experience of other photographers. For example, a whole blog is dedicated to food photography: lessons, examples, tips and lots and lots of photos.

Have you read everything and want to become a food stylist? Then the advice of professionals will help - they know exactly where to start.

Food is an excellent subject for still life photography and can be used to create excellent artistic photographs. But to take an exceptional photo, it's not enough to just click what's on the plate. Like any other genre, food photography has its own rules, and they must be followed if you want to achieve wonderful colors, textures and shapes. This collection contains 13 simple but very effective tips on how to get truly delicious shots using your iPhone.

1. Shoot in natural light

Light is a key element when creating beautiful still lifes. Always photograph food in natural daylight, not under a lamp - it will give the photo an unpleasant orange or yellowish tint. Light is extremely important in food photography if you want to capture the true colors of the food, plates, and background. Why do you need yellow rice, yellow dishes and a yellow tablecloth when in fact it's all white?

The best lighting for eating is soft, diffused, natural daylight. In warm weather, you can even try taking photos outside. But in most cases you should avoid direct sun rays, because in such light there may be problems with exposure, and objects will cast harsh shadows.

The ideal option is a cloudy day: clouds scatter the sun's rays and create soft light with soft shadows. If you're shooting indoors, it's best to do it on a table near a window so that natural light illuminates the composition.

2. Control the shadows

Shadows are very important in photography. They can make or break your photo. Their intensity depends on the lighting in which you photograph. The bright direct rays of the sun create harsh, dark shadows. On a cloudy day they will be much softer. The photo above was taken in bright light. Pay attention to the shadows. Sometimes harsh shadows can add drama to a shot, especially when they create unusual silhouettes that complement the composition.

But in most cases, when shooting still life and food photography, harsh shadows should be avoided. Soft shadows work better; they create depth and volume without overpowering the rest of the image. Therefore, it is best to shoot on a cloudy day or move your composition to a slightly shaded area.

If you are shooting indoors, the direct sunlight that hits the window can be diffused with translucent white curtains. You can also move the object further away from the window or move it to another window altogether.

If you are shooting outside on a sunny day and there is no way to move into the shadows, a reflector will come to the rescue. You can use a professional reflector, but a simple sheet of white paper will do.

Install the reflector on the side where the shadows fall, so that it is opposite the sun. The rays will reflect from it and fall on the subject, brightening the shadows. The green smoothie photo was taken on a very bright sunny day with a white leaf as a reflector.

Of course, it all depends on you. If you want shadows in a photo, let there be shadows. But always be aware of the role that light and shadow play in a photo, and manipulate them to get the image you intended.

3. Use a neutral background

The background is just as important as the subject. If it is unkempt or bright, it can attract too much attention, distracting from the food itself. A relatively neutral background will allow you to focus on the subject. Moreover, a “neutral background” does not mean that it should be completely simple or monochromatic; it should only complement the composition and not suppress it.

There are three types of backgrounds that work very well with food photography: light, dark, and wood (brown). A dark dish usually looks better against a dark background and vice versa. Wooden surfaces - tables, cutting boards - are suitable for almost any food.

You can use almost anything as a background. Wooden table by the window - great way combine a good background and natural lighting. Compositions look great on a kitchen towel or tablecloth, especially if they are white. Colored options, such as a vintage floral pattern, are also suitable for some types of food.

You can also try a black board, mat, tile, baking paper, baking sheet or newspaper as a background. If you're photographing food from the side, try to keep the opposite wall a neutral, soft, subdued color.

4. Think about color

Food photography provides a wonderful opportunity to work with color. Colors themselves greatly influence the entire composition and overall impression of the photo. The photo above uses similar shades - warm, earthy tones give a feeling of comfort and calm.

To achieve the opposite effect, you need to use contrasting colors. They create a bright, dynamic image that excites the eye. The contrast between red and green works especially well.

Contrast can be based on the juxtaposition of food and background or the use of several different colors of the food itself. Contrasts in smoothies turn out to be very interesting - it’s beautiful, fun, and tasty.

5. Choose the right angle

When photographing food, always choose the angle that best presents your composition. Shooting from above is often ideal, especially when the food is beautifully presented on a plate or in a bowl.

This perspective has several advantages. It allows you to capture all the details of the dish and background, emphasizing the shapes of plates, cutlery and other objects. In addition, when shooting from above, it is much easier to create a strong, harmonious composition - it is enough to correctly position the elements on the surface. Lastly, this angle is great for cutting out unwanted elements in the background.

However, if you're photographing a drink in a glass or a cake with interesting layers, it's worth taking the shot from the side. This is also the best angle if you want to show the details of sliced ​​bread, pie, muffin, etc. Just make sure to photograph against a neutral background, such as a light-colored wall.

Another way is to shoot diagonally. This option combines the advantages of the previous two and allows you to emphasize the three-dimensionality of the subject. If you're not sure how best to shoot a particular composition, try photographing it from different angles. You will be surprised when you see how different the stories turn out to be.

6. Arrange food beautifully

Composition is a key element of good photography, so think carefully about the placement of each subject. There is nothing worse than a plate with food piled unsightly on it. This is not food photography. Always try to arrange ingredients neatly or unusually to create visual interest and harmony.

Again, you can always play with fruits and vegetables - you can cut them up and arrange them in a pattern on a plate, tray or baking sheet. After you have laid out the composition, make sure that you have not spilled any juice or sauce - all spills must be carefully wiped off so that there are no unsightly puddles or blots in the photo.

7. Leave enough space

Before you click the shutter, make sure there is some empty space around the plate - you don't want it to completely take up the entire frame. Of course, sometimes close-ups of food look great, but more often than not, open, clear space creates a more pleasing composition and puts more emphasis on the shapes of the subjects.

Free space with a dark background adds dark tones to photographs; a light background, on the contrary, makes the image lighter. Experiment with placement. Maybe the plate of food would look better clearly in the middle of the frame, or maybe it would be better to move it slightly to the side. Ideally, you need to make several variations to find out which position in in this case looks best.

8. Decorate the place

Food and background are the main elements, but to make your photos even more interesting, you can decorate them with a few small items. A good option is to use some of the dry ingredients that were used in the preparation. This will make the composition more interesting and create a “visual recipe” for your dish.

Spices look great as a decoration. You can fill a spoon with turmeric or cinnamon and place it somewhere in the frame. You can pour piles of multi-colored spices or scatter sugar, salt, and pepper over the background. Berries, pieces of fruit, nuts, chocolate slices and fresh herbs are also great for decoration.

Moreover, these can be inedible items: cutlery, dishes - their shapes and lines are useful for creating a composition. Colored pebbles, as in the photo below, are also quite capable of bringing a photo to life. Always imagine how the colors of the decorations will match the colors of the food and background. Will they contrast or, conversely, complement each other?

You can also use natural components - they will make the photo more vivid and symbolize the time of year in which the photo was taken. In summer it can be flowers - they will add brightness and tenderness. The leaves also look great - in the photo below they create a characteristic autumn mood.

Nature is an endless source of inspiration. Acorns or chestnuts, cones or pebbles - all this can decorate your composition.

9. Create a story

Photography is a wonderful way to tell a story without words. By introducing certain elements, you can create an interesting story that will definitely attract the viewer to the photo. Think about what can give your photo a dreamy, exciting, exciting atmosphere. For example, you can place an open novel next to the plate or place a couple of teas to create a feeling of comfort and warmth.

A laptop in the background will tell you that you took a break from work for a while for a cup of freshly brewed coffee, and a cookbook will tell you that you are experimenting with new recipes.
The photo below is permeated with an atmosphere of relaxation and freedom.

Chamomile tea, a book, pieces of chocolate allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the photo and feel how nice it is to simply enjoy life.

10. Add a human element

Another way to tell an interesting, extraordinary story in one frame is to add a human element. A hand in a photograph allows you to create a feeling of the viewer’s presence in the picture - as if he took it himself.

Using this technique, you'll have to hold your iPhone with one hand, so try to get as steady as possible before pressing the shoot button.

If you're sitting around a table with friends, why not capture the hands of all of you? This photo will always tell the story of your friendship and the happiness that brought you together at the table with delicious food.

11. Keep it simple

Above we talked about different ways to decorate a photo, but sometimes the best option- make the shot as simple as possible. If the food you're photographing is brightly colored or unusually shaped and sits against a contrasting background, a simple, minimalist composition is ideal. For maximum impact, position your subject strictly in the center of the frame and avoid any significant decoration.

In this situation, it is better to avoid patterned or brightly colored plates or cups. Plain white china is the best choice because it won't distract from the food. If you're shooting close-up, there's no need for jewelry at all. In photography, sometimes less is more.

12. Adjust exposure

Once you've got your composition together and the lighting in place, the last thing you need to do before you click the shoot button is adjust your exposure level. Simply put, exposure determines the brightness level of an image. the main problem is that white plates and white backgrounds may be overexposed (too bright, without visible details). To avoid overexposure, you should set the exposure to the brightest places.

To adjust exposure in the camera app, tap on the area you want to sharpen, then simply swipe up or down on the screen. Up to increase exposure and brighten the image, down to decrease it and darken the frame.

Exposure is most problematic when shooting high-contrast scenes - for example, if you are photographing a white plate against a dark background. The contrast is so strong that it will be difficult for the camera to simultaneously capture detail in both the brightest and darkest areas.

In such cases, you need to set the exposure to the brightest places, and the shadows can always be brightened in post-processing. Darkening overexposed areas so that the details are visible is much more difficult, and sometimes even impossible.

13. Improve colors in a photo editor

There are hundreds of colors and shades of food, but the iPhone can't always capture them exactly as you see them. Sometimes they clearly lack brightness, and sometimes they should be slightly dimmed. Fortunately, color can always be adjusted using photo editors. There are many filters, as well as individual tools that allow you to adjust image settings.

It's worth experimenting with filters to find the one that suits a particular image. Filters that add brightness to colors make the photo more vibrant and saturated. Filters, on the contrary, mute the color and create a softer mood. If you don't like filters, you can always use tools that allow you to adjust color saturation, color temperature, hue and tone.

Summary

Let's summarize. The iPhone is a great tool for taking food photographs, and following these simple rules, you are sure to get some very appetizing pictures. So why not start right now - cook a delicious meal, bake cookies, cut fruit, whip up a smoothie, buy a beautiful cake and start taking photos?

Pay attention to lighting and shadows. Try shooting both indoors and outdoors.
Choose a background that will complement your composition, experiment with shooting angles.

Be sure to create a beautiful, clean, balanced composition.
Use decorations, add a human element, create your own story.

And, of course, don’t forget to process the frame to improve the colors and give it the right mood.

And remember that the best thing about food photography is being able to eat all the goodies after the photo shoot!

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In the current world, when social networks in general and Instagram in particular occupy an integral role in our lives, good quality beautiful photo this is our everything. Especially if you are an online confectioner, that is, your clients find you via the Internet, look at your portfolio first, and read reviews about you. As you know, the Internet does not convey smells and tastes, unfortunately, so your potential client chooses with his eyes. A photo can convey all the appetizing, beauty and “deliciousness” of your baked goods, believe me! Man seeing beautiful picture, which is accompanied good description, he himself will complete the picture in his imagination of what a wonderful and delicious cake this is, how textured its sides look, how appetizingly shiny the glaze is, how fragrant this delicate cream with vanilla seeds is and how crispy this airy meringue melts in your mouth! Often, confectioners pay little attention to photos, displaying in their portfolios unclear, blurry photos against the backdrop of some unpresentable everyday picture under the yellow light of lamps. Perhaps your baked goods are divinely delicious and Pierre Hermé himself, having tasted a piece, will turn black with envy, but with a bad photograph, few will guess about this. Moreover, now there are a lot of online confectioners, and you need to stand out among them; high-quality, artistically designed photos of your work will greatly help with this. Perhaps you will even have your own “handwriting”, and from the photo it will be clear that these are your works.

To help you understand how to do high-quality photograph, Homebaked interviewed a food photographer and food stylist Daria Bliznyuk. Daria lives in Rostov-on-Don and has been interested in photography and cooking for a long time. During her first maternity leave, the girl fell in love with preparing complex dishes, making step by step photos to recipes and post them on various culinary portals. Later came the desire to learn how to make tasty not only food, but also photos. The desire to improve does not leave Daria for a minute!

Tell us how inspiration comes - do you want to photograph some object, and a composition is built in your head, or does everything happen spontaneously?

The most important thing is to imagine what this object is associated with... what relationships are drawn... sometimes, as they say, you have to sleep with the thought and then everything falls into place in your head and all that remains is to catch everything with the lens))) and a spontaneous explosion of desire happens You can immediately take a photo when that same towel falls into your hands... a delicate twig with leaves or a mug of aromatic tea.

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What assistants should a food photographer and food stylist have?

If a person takes the first steps towards beautiful food photos, the most chief assistant– natural daylight. Let it be slightly smoothed out by a transparent white curtain or even barely noticeable; it is better to turn off the flashes built into the camera so that the color remains natural; you can shoot from any angle, the main thing is to experiment. You can stand on a stool above the dining table and take one photo with your phone, resulting in an incredibly appetizing picture, or you can spend hours spinning around in a professional studio with fancy equipment and get a standard slicked-out facelessness.
Choose a plain surface for the background or a lightly decorated one, without bright patterns or complex color combinations, so that the main subject of the photograph immediately catches the eye.
Opt for white plates, mugs, teapots - this color will always add sophistication and emphasize the beauty of the subject.
This does not mean that you should not have bright and exotic dishes, elegant napkins in a bright geometric pattern or a red straw for a glass of juice, just everything should be in moderation, everything should give a feeling of harmony.

You have very interesting compositions, with some kind of history, how to arrange objects so as not to overload the photo. Is there an unspoken maximum number of items in a photo?

Look for inspiration in glossy magazines, on culinary portals, go to cafes, bars, restaurants and absorb beauty like sponges.
To get an interesting shot, the dish must live in the lens. All items should not just be taken from nowhere, they should complement and emphasize the beauty of the dish. But at the same time, the most beautiful cup or brightest napkin should not attract all the attention; if this happens, remove them mercilessly.
There shouldn't be too many items. A piece of cake on a saucer and a cup of tea, a carelessly dropped flower or a teaspoon can already create harmony.

Read also 10 cream cheese recipes for all occasions

How to beautifully photograph a cake or pastry; with what additional items do you think they look more harmonious?

You can photograph the cake on its own at a 45-60 degree angle if you want to draw attention to the side or tiered design. You can take a shot “from above” if such a shot most advantageously emphasizes the geometricity of the sides and the originality of the main decoration.
The cake can be placed on a special stand or simply on a beautiful dish, then it will not look so formal; if this is not possible, then just place a small bouquet or a few berries/fruits used in decoration next to it.
You can place a large knife next to the cake, which you plan to use to cut it, and a spatula to place the pieces on plates. The cake can be supplemented with a cup of tea/coffee, a teaspoon or dessert fork, a glass of juice or milk, for example.

What are the most difficult moments when shooting?

The hardest thing is not to get too carried away. The food should be beautiful, but true to reality. If you see the perfect salad on a restaurant menu, and they bring you something that doesn’t even remotely resemble it, you’re unlikely to be happy.
On the other hand, a photograph of food should make you want to eat what you see in the picture. If such a desire does not arise, then you need to take a different photo.

What is your favorite job and why?

My favorite is the one that awaits me in the future)) Each Previous work I value it because this is a new round and a step towards improvement.. every real work is dear, since it is what allows you to do what you love here and now))

What are the main mistakes most beginning food photographers make?

The biggest mistake is to consider yourself a professional too early, not to listen to other people’s advice and to impose your opinion on the customer.

A photographer is first and foremost an artist

Remember the still lifes of famous masters of the brush - each element of the composition is in its place and complements the others. Photography requires the same approach. A poorly placed teaspoon or too bright background can ruin the photo, drawing all the attention to itself. When creating a composition, we recommend taking into account:

• The background should be neutral, preferably light shades (but not white), and not blend in with the color of the cream and cakes. The same goes for a tablecloth, table or dish (tray).
• Additional elements of the composition should be selected in accordance with the cake design style. For example, confetti and artificial snow are suitable for New Year's dessert; pearls, fresh flowers, lace - for wedding.
• It is better to photograph exclusive cakes with complex decor without additional items.
• But if you are filming a slice of dessert, then a beautiful spoon or cup of tea in the frame will make the picture especially appetizing.

How to understand that the composition has been chosen successfully? The central element of the photo should be the cake, and additional details emphasize its beauty and design. If the eye first “clings” to the background or pattern on the dish, it is worth replacing them with something neutral and removing unnecessary objects.

Angle and light – the magic wands of professionals

On the Internet you can find many amateur photographs in which, it would seem, the cake is made perfectly and the composition is created successfully, but something is missing. As a rule, the reason is the wrong angle and light. (By the way, let's tell you a secret, with a well-set light, the simplest dessert will look very tempting).

• The best angle for photos of desserts is as if the sweetness is in front of a person and you can try a piece right now. That is, at an angle of 40 - 45 degrees, so that the edge of the treat and part of its top are visible. If you need to photograph the unusual decoration of the top of the cake, it is permissible to photograph the dessert from above. It is recommended to shoot multi-tiered masterpieces at an angle of 10 – 20 degrees.
• The ideal light for photographs is diffused daylight. To prevent the rays from hitting the lens, it is advisable to shoot indoors, in a well-lit room, but without placing the cake near the windowsill. It is optimal that the source of sunlight is located on the side, then on the other side of the dessert you can place a special reflector (a sheet of white paper, foil). If natural light is not enough, it is recommended to install additional lamps on the sides. It is better to refuse the flash.

It is also worth considering the capabilities of your camera, and install a tripod if necessary.

Photo editor is the icing on the cake

Do you shoot on your phone or point-and-shoot camera? Then a photo editor should become your best friend. In addition to the well-known Photoshop, there are many simple programs that even a beginner can easily understand. As a rule, standard editors with several filters, brightness, contrast and color controls are included in every phone. Additionally, you can select simple programs for retouching, which will help improve the quality of the photo and make it more alive.

Are you already prepared for successful shots followed by tasting delicious cakes? We offer desserts with unusual designs and unforgettable tastes that will decorate your holiday and create a real sensation on social networks!