Digital Food Photography

Great food always elicits strong reactions-the smell of freshly baked bread, the taste of a perfectly prepared steak. The job of a food photographer is to elicit that same mouth-watering reaction, but without the benefit of scent or taste. A well-shot photograph can send crowds flocking to a new restaurant or boost the sales of a culinary magazine. Capturing the perfect image requires a trained eye, finesse, and photographic skill. Digital Food Photography gives you the ingredients to cook up your own recipe for success-with professional lighting techniques, composition, food and prop styling, retouching, and tricks of the trade. You’ll learn how digital photography combines teamwork, creativity, and technology, and how to make money creating delectable works of photographic art. 

 

Intended for professional photographers, this guide explains how to use a digital camera to take high quality photographs of food, reveals the secrets of food stylists, and offers advice on planning the shoot, lighting, shot composition, props, and retouching the image with Photoshop. The author provides several color shots of the same dish to illustrate his work process.

 

 

Table of Contents

Introduction 

1. The Key Ingredient: Pixels 

2. Digital Photography: The Necessities 

3. Who’s Digesting It: Advertising, Packaging, Public Relations, and the Media 

4. Who’s Doing the Cooking: Working with Food Stylists 

5. Prop Styling: Who’s Doing the Shopping? 

6. Grabbing Your Attention: Composition 

7. The Recipe for Light 

8. The Digital Spice: Retouching 

9. Get Cooking and Make Some Money: Getting into the Business

 

 

Lou Manna is an award-winning Olympus Visionary photographer. He has more than 30 years of experience working with chefs, photographing cookbooks, and shooting food for publications such as Wine Enthusiast, Food Arts, and The New York Times, where he worked as a photojournalist from 1975 to 1990. Manna is an early adopter of digital technology¿he has been shooting digitally for more than 10 years. Manna has worked on location and in his studio with famous chefs such as Michael Lomonaco, Jacques Pepin, Bobby Flay, Lidia Bastianich, and Emeril Lagasse. He has appeared on ABC-TV¿s World of Photography and on the Food Network, and has lectured at the French Culinary Institute. Manna¿s award-winning photos have appeared in more than 30 cookbooks, including Dr. Phil’s The Ultimate Weight Solution Cookbook, Jacques Torres’s Dessert Circus, Pierre Franey’s Cuisine Rapide, and Arthur Hettich’s The Four Star Kitchen. He recently provided a number of shots for The New York Times¿s bestsellers America 24/7 and New York 24/7.

 

Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers

 

 

Time-tested lighting strategies that will improve the quality of a portrait are detailed in this book for beginning photographers. Terminology used by industry pros is explained, the equipment needed to create professional results is outlined, and the unique role that each element of the lighting setup plays in the studio is explored. Photographers learn how color, direction, form, and contrast affect the final portrait. The concise text, photo examples, and lighting diagrams enable photographers to easily achieve traditional lighting styles that have been the basis of good portraiture since the advent of the art.

 

Christopher Grey is a master of photographic lighting, and this expertise shines through in his latest book, appropriately titled, Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers. Grey eases his readers into the topic with a discussion on the properties and quality of light and a review of modern lighting equipment, both store-bought and homemade. Then, after an informative chapter on lighting ratios (a frequently misused and misunderstood term) he embarks on an instructive and comprehensive journey that covers everything from classic lighting styles to the advanced lighting methods used by today’s top studio photographers. Beautiful color photos and helpful diagrams complement each scenario.

 

Grey’s writing is conversational and witty, which is a blessing when one is digesting material that, in duller texts, can quickly veer off into technical mumbo jumbo. In addition to his lighting information, he sprinkles every chapter with plenty of useful advice – things he’s learned during his 30-year career – for saving money, choosing backdrops, building trust with subjects, capturing better expressions and much, much more. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in portrait photography. The photographs alone are well worth the purchase price, but the lessons enabling readers to create similarly stunning photos make the book an extremely good value

 

Christopher Grey is the author of Creative Techniques for Nude Photography and Photographer’s Guide to Polaroid Transfer. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.