Odin Hartshorn Halvorson is a writer, geek, and hopeful futurist. A graduate from Stonecoast MFA, his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the founder of Round Table Writers, an organization dedicated to “writers helping writers.” Odin’s love of Roddenberrian and Straczynskian ideals leads him to contemplate technology’s role in our evolving philosophic landscape, a line of inquiry threaded through both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Learn more at OdinHalvorson.com
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Alan C. Clarke, science fiction writer, TV host, underwater explorer and inventor.
Note-taking applications have been all the rage for years, with hits like Evernote striking it big enough to enter the public lexicon, becoming commonplace terms. Others, like Roam and TheBrain, go a lot deeper, adding powerful functionality not merely designed to provide a better note-taking experience, but actively promote better note-recall and exploration. That’s where Obsidian comes in, the new kid on the block with some mighty big ideas and the experienced team to make it all happen.
The question that arose for me was: What program best fits my needs?
Zettelkasten note-taking
My own philosophy of note-taking is that of the Zettlekasten(German for “slip-box” or “note-box”). This method works by linking notes forward to similar notes and generating new notes from existing ones during explorations of the note collection. For this, while you can certainly use the classic method that relies on post-cards, I find it far easier to handle with the use of a clever computer program and a dual-monitor workstation. The question that arose for me was “what program best fits my needs?”
How I found Obsidian
During the pandemic, I began looking for ways to better handle my knowledge flow and retention. At a workshop with the science fiction author Tobias Buckell, I learned about Obsidian and the powerful ways it supports note-taking, idea generation, and retrieval of information for later use. As an academic and professional writer, this matters to me; in the age of Deep Work (as author Cal Newport calls it), we need to have the tools at our disposal which streamline the process of our work as much as possible while aiding us in the deep knowledge dive.
What is Obsidian?
The Obsidian team actually only began working on the project during the Covid-19 pandemic, free to spend extra time turning a concept into a reality. While Obsidian is in many ways optimized for knowledge workers who interact heavily with code, its features provide any knowledge worker with a vast array of tools for organization and insight generation. Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes, as well as a beautiful space within which to connect the dots in surprising ways between existing notes and therefore generate my own ideas and thoughts from those pre-existing points.
Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes
This article is intended as a brief top-down review and introduction to the features of Obsidian, which I will then go into in greater detail in future articles that concentrate on specific “how-to” questions. This is a big and complex program, but the learning curve is wonderfully shallow. It’s possible to jump in straight out of the gate with very little knowledge and expand as you go, but I promise that by following the guides here you’ll be able to make headway all that much quicker.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
Note-taking applications have been all the rage for years, with hits like Evernote striking it big enough to enter the public lexicon, becoming commonplace terms. Others, like Roam and TheBrain, go a lot deeper, adding powerful functionality not merely designed to provide a better note-taking experience, but actively promote better note-recall and exploration. That’s where Obsidian comes in, the new kid on the block with some mighty big ideas and the experienced team to make it all happen.
The question that arose for me was: What program best fits my needs?
Zettelkasten note-taking
My own philosophy of note-taking is that of the Zettlekasten(German for “slip-box” or “note-box”). This method works by linking notes forward to similar notes and generating new notes from existing ones during explorations of the note collection. For this, while you can certainly use the classic method that relies on post-cards, I find it far easier to handle with the use of a clever computer program and a dual-monitor workstation. The question that arose for me was “what program best fits my needs?”
How I found Obsidian
During the pandemic, I began looking for ways to better handle my knowledge flow and retention. At a workshop with the science fiction author Tobias Buckell, I learned about Obsidian and the powerful ways it supports note-taking, idea generation, and retrieval of information for later use. As an academic and professional writer, this matters to me; in the age of Deep Work (as author Cal Newport calls it), we need to have the tools at our disposal which streamline the process of our work as much as possible while aiding us in the deep knowledge dive.
What is Obsidian?
The Obsidian team actually only began working on the project during the Covid-19 pandemic, free to spend extra time turning a concept into a reality. While Obsidian is in many ways optimized for knowledge workers who interact heavily with code, its features provide any knowledge worker with a vast array of tools for organization and insight generation. Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes, as well as a beautiful space within which to connect the dots in surprising ways between existing notes and therefore generate my own ideas and thoughts from those pre-existing points.
Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes
This article is intended as a brief top-down review and introduction to the features of Obsidian, which I will then go into in greater detail in future articles that concentrate on specific “how-to” questions. This is a big and complex program, but the learning curve is wonderfully shallow. It’s possible to jump in straight out of the gate with very little knowledge and expand as you go, but I promise that by following the guides here you’ll be able to make headway all that much quicker.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
Note-taking applications have been all the rage for years, with hits like Evernote striking it big enough to enter the public lexicon, becoming commonplace terms. Others, like Roam and TheBrain, go a lot deeper, adding powerful functionality not merely designed to provide a better note-taking experience, but actively promote better note-recall and exploration. That’s where Obsidian comes in, the new kid on the block with some mighty big ideas and the experienced team to make it all happen.
The question that arose for me was: What program best fits my needs?
Zettelkasten note-taking
My own philosophy of note-taking is that of the Zettlekasten(German for “slip-box” or “note-box”). This method works by linking notes forward to similar notes and generating new notes from existing ones during explorations of the note collection. For this, while you can certainly use the classic method that relies on post-cards, I find it far easier to handle with the use of a clever computer program and a dual-monitor workstation. The question that arose for me was “what program best fits my needs?”
How I found Obsidian
During the pandemic, I began looking for ways to better handle my knowledge flow and retention. At a workshop with the science fiction author Tobias Buckell, I learned about Obsidian and the powerful ways it supports note-taking, idea generation, and retrieval of information for later use. As an academic and professional writer, this matters to me; in the age of Deep Work (as author Cal Newport calls it), we need to have the tools at our disposal which streamline the process of our work as much as possible while aiding us in the deep knowledge dive.
What is Obsidian?
The Obsidian team actually only began working on the project during the Covid-19 pandemic, free to spend extra time turning a concept into a reality. While Obsidian is in many ways optimized for knowledge workers who interact heavily with code, its features provide any knowledge worker with a vast array of tools for organization and insight generation. Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes, as well as a beautiful space within which to connect the dots in surprising ways between existing notes and therefore generate my own ideas and thoughts from those pre-existing points.
Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes
This article is intended as a brief top-down review and introduction to the features of Obsidian, which I will then go into in greater detail in future articles that concentrate on specific “how-to” questions. This is a big and complex program, but the learning curve is wonderfully shallow. It’s possible to jump in straight out of the gate with very little knowledge and expand as you go, but I promise that by following the guides here you’ll be able to make headway all that much quicker.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
Note-taking applications have been all the rage for years, with hits like Evernote striking it big enough to enter the public lexicon, becoming commonplace terms. Others, like Roam and TheBrain, go a lot deeper, adding powerful functionality not merely designed to provide a better note-taking experience, but actively promote better note-recall and exploration. That’s where Obsidian comes in, the new kid on the block with some mighty big ideas and the experienced team to make it all happen.
The question that arose for me was: What program best fits my needs?
Zettelkasten note-taking
My own philosophy of note-taking is that of the Zettlekasten(German for “slip-box” or “note-box”). This method works by linking notes forward to similar notes and generating new notes from existing ones during explorations of the note collection. For this, while you can certainly use the classic method that relies on post-cards, I find it far easier to handle with the use of a clever computer program and a dual-monitor workstation. The question that arose for me was “what program best fits my needs?”
How I found Obsidian
During the pandemic, I began looking for ways to better handle my knowledge flow and retention. At a workshop with the science fiction author Tobias Buckell, I learned about Obsidian and the powerful ways it supports note-taking, idea generation, and retrieval of information for later use. As an academic and professional writer, this matters to me; in the age of Deep Work (as author Cal Newport calls it), we need to have the tools at our disposal which streamline the process of our work as much as possible while aiding us in the deep knowledge dive.
What is Obsidian?
The Obsidian team actually only began working on the project during the Covid-19 pandemic, free to spend extra time turning a concept into a reality. While Obsidian is in many ways optimized for knowledge workers who interact heavily with code, its features provide any knowledge worker with a vast array of tools for organization and insight generation. Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes, as well as a beautiful space within which to connect the dots in surprising ways between existing notes and therefore generate my own ideas and thoughts from those pre-existing points.
Combined with the Zettelkasten approach to notes, Obsidian allows for a powerful storage and retrieval system for all of my notes
This article is intended as a brief top-down review and introduction to the features of Obsidian, which I will then go into in greater detail in future articles that concentrate on specific “how-to” questions. This is a big and complex program, but the learning curve is wonderfully shallow. It’s possible to jump in straight out of the gate with very little knowledge and expand as you go, but I promise that by following the guides here you’ll be able to make headway all that much quicker.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
With cloud note-taking services you often have to fork over some aspect of your private data for the use of the system, or else pay various fees to keep using the software. Worse, if you want to switch from those services, doing so can be a huge hassle that can ultimately break your whole note-taking system, especially if the service you’ve been using handles your notes with some sort of non-standard file type.
Obsidian is free with paid extensions and all the files live directly on your computer (or in your own cloud storage) and therefore you never have to worry about losing access to your work. The file type is plain text with markdown (Obsidian natively supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown), too, so if you ever decide that you want to leave Obsidian, you can easily migrate your work elsewhere.
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
To create an interconnected network of notes, you need a method to interconnect them, and you need to be able to do so at any point in time, for any note, regardless of when it was created. Through backlinks, Obsidian allows you to do just that, creating internal links between notes being a fundamental feature of the platform. It’s easy, too, with automatic search features built into the software, so all you have to do is type two brackets [[ and Obsidian will automatically help you find the note you want to link to).
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
I love graph view in Obsidian, and it’s actually this that finalized my decision to go with it over all the other options. The web method of note-taking exemplified by Zettlekasten is about breadth rather than depth; a deep stack of notes is cumbersome and you’re less likely to find what you’re looking for, especially if you want to encounter it organically rather than through a simple direct search).
Obsidian allows you to graphically experience this process in its map view, which shows all of your notes as little dots on a limitless canvas. Once you start linking notes, lines form on the canvas connecting the linked notes, and a simple physics engine adds an organic feel to your little constellation of notes. Over time, clusters form, and you’ll be able to see where your biggest notes and your biggest collections of notes are; you’ll start to see the patterns in how you think, as well as how you conduct research. As a highly visual person, this was extremely exciting.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
There’s something extremely powerful about the old-fashioned method of writing down notes on index cards and then placing those index cards before you on a blank table. Arranging them in different ways, exchanging one card for another, is a process that allows for deep idea generation and the formulation of interesting arguments that might otherwise have been hidden from your conscious mind.
Until Obsidian, I had not found a platform that allowed me to mimic anything like this physical process. But the designers clearly wanted the same thing as I. Obsidian uses panes that can be opened side-by-side for individual notes, allowing you to pin, combine, or sift through your notes at your leisure. I recommend a large screen or a multi-monitor experience to make the most of this, but even on a smaller screen, it provides a powerful connective tool.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Human beings are creatures who adore the shiny thing; we love making our space into a reflection of our personality and style. Obsidian’s ability to use custom CSS to alter the look of the program is great for those who want or need to set their notes up in a certain visual style. Obsidian comes with a light and dark basic style, but advanced work can change every aspect of the program’s face, making it suit your needs.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
Customization is a vital part of any program. The more a community can customize and work together to improve something, the better the result will be. This is where Obsidian’s remarkable community of like-minded users and enthusiasts comes into play.
Obsidian is highly customizable and there are already a large number of plugins that enhance the functionality, solve issues that the developers have not yet explored, and add whole new feature sets that expand the usefulness of the program almost indefinitely, making it possible for knowledge workers in any discipline to find the enhancements they need to get the most out of the program.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
This isn’t an official feature, per se, but the ability to sync all of your work to a private GitHub, complete with total version control, is a big win. A lot of major cloud services get blocked by the more serious firewalls people are likely to encounter at work or on high-security networks. Being able to sync with a personal vault means that Obsidian can be used on a fire-walled machine and then saved to the GitHub vault where work can be continued from a personal computer elsewhere.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
I mentioned this earlier, but Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with relatively low monthly costs for advanced features like Obsidian’s own sync service or the ability to publish your database to the web. Their website states that the personal version is free forever, and as of March 2021 the pricing for all other features is marked down by 50% as an “early bird” special for all those who are joining the project while it is still in development.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
Obsidian has already released beta versions of its iOS and Android application for testing by the VIP community and is working toward a public release in the not-too-distant future. This will allow for complete synchronization across all devices, ensuring that Obsidian’s powerful note-taking and note-exploration functions are always accessible.
There have even been hints by the team from Ratta, the company that designed my favorite e-ink device, the Supernote, that they are aware of Obsidian and are considering methods of integrating it into their list of side-loaded software. That would mean that all those amazing Supernote note-taking features could be applied directly to Obsidian’s incredible platform. You can bet your breeches I’ll be writing about that should it finally come to pass.
Odin Hartshorn Halvorson is a writer, geek, and hopeful futurist. A graduate from Stonecoast MFA, his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the founder of Round Table Writers, an organization dedicated to “writers helping writers.” Odin’s love of Roddenberrian and Straczynskian ideals leads him to contemplate technology’s role in our evolving philosophic landscape, a line of inquiry threaded through both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Learn more at OdinHalvorson.com
Ash is an experienced tech writer with an endless passion for technology. She enjoys retro gaming, 3D printing, and making awesome projects on the Raspberry Pi.
This interest contains guides that cover all things RetroPie!
What is RetroPie? RetroPie is a popular software library for the Raspberry Pi that is used to emulate retro video games.
A maker at heart, Michael loves all things DIY. Michael is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor. He has published two books of poetry and has writing in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and many others. He has taught writing at colleges across the country, and managed many leading literary magazines to national prominence. Now, he’s excited to devote his energies full time to Howchoo. He currently resides in the Tampa-area with his wife and puppy.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There’s a tremendous interest in food photography right now, and not just from foodies. Many want to know how people create such eye-popping and mouth-watering images. This article highlights what the top photographers do to turn average ingredients into masterpieces of food photography art.
You don’t need to spend thousands on camera kits to get started. There’s no need to cover travel or model fees, and the topic has universal appeal.
Modern camera technology is amazing. Improved sensors, clever lenses, and digital processing have democratized the art. Even a modest smartphone can outperform a compact camera of just a few years ago. This means that many people are experimenting with food photography, and some are even thinking about turning professional.
In this guide, we explain what the human behind the camera needs to do to take great photographs of food. You’ll discover that the best photographers have been working harder than you ever imagined.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
There are many reasons to shoot food, from blogging gastronomic exploits to making a living as a food photographer. Just snapping plates of food could mean that you are missing a key component of any art; the capacity to evoke emotion in your audience. Images have the power to recall feelings.
Carve out a niche and make it your own.
When shooting food in a restaurant, try to include visual clues that will spark a memory. Capture the people, the setting, and the atmosphere too.
Shooting in the studio is technically challenging for both the chef and the photographer. Attention to detail is essential. Research the best photographers in the field and try to develop your own style. Carve out a niche and make it your own.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Let’s consider the shape of your image. How do you or your client plan to use the photograph? For example, as part of a website design, published on Instagram or within a YouTube video. Or perhaps all three.
In the image above, you can see that the aspect ratio dramatically affects the image’s shape. The original is in the top-left and has an aspect ratio of 3×2. It is probably the view that Brooke saw in the camera viewfinder. You can imagine that she might have adjusted the composition if she had seen one of the other views. Even without this, her experience has led her to create a usable photograph in all formats.
Shape
The shape of the image sensor in your camera determines the shape of your image and the default aspect ratio. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1. Shoot at the same ratio as your camera’s sensor to make the best use of the imaging area. If you want to change the aspect ratio later, use image-editing software to crop the photo. The image above shows how much image area is lost when a 3×2 aspect ratio image is cropped for different formats.
Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
Orientation
If you’re not shooting a square format, you need to decide the image’s orientation. If the long side is along the top, then that’s described as landscape format. If the short side is along the top, then it’s portrait format. Gabrielle Henderson has cleverly composed the photograph above. It will work in just about any orientation or format.
If you are producing photographs for a specific purpose, decide the best orientation before pressing the button. If you are unsure, then shoot both a portrait and a landscape view and choose later. Part of the skill is knowing how the photograph will look when displayed.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Now that you know your image’s shape, you can think about how to compose the view in your viewfinder. Some like to pontificate about photographic composition and make rules for others to follow. Much of the composition already exists in food photography, on the plate, and by a conventional table-setting layout.
A problem-solving approach to composition
Below is a list of hints and observations. Each point is a problem for you to solve. For the first point, you may think about using the camera to frame different views; above, around, and below the subject’s level. For the last, you may think about using a simple sketch of the article layout to help you compose the photograph.
Food photography: hints and observations
Moving the camera around offers more options for composition.
Accidentally including things that don’t look good can make a photograph unusable.
It helps to decide on the principal subject for your image and consider how it relates to the rest of the composition.
There should be an obvious point of focus in any image, usually the principal subject.
A principal subject can get lost if it does not dominate the scene.
Making slight changes of composition in each of many shots will give you more choice when selecting a final image.
Photographs destined to illustrate articles can benefit from simple backgrounds with room to add text.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
Human vision adapts automatically to lighting conditions. We don’t usually think about it unless it is too dark or too light. When photographing food, you need to train your gaze to see subtle shadows and highlights. Only when you are aware of the light on your plate of food can you make changes to improve the effect. The task becomes easier with practice, and the results can be very satisfying.
When controlled, daylight is the perfect light source for photographing food. Results often show the best color rendition and natural quality. Choose studio lights carefully if daylight shooting is not practical, as not all types of lamps produce good results. A single light combined with a selection of reflectors, baffles, and filters can create a wide range of lighting effects.
Subject eggs
Acquire a few eggs to experiment with different food photography lighting setups. Eggs are textured, subtle in color, and just the right shape for seeing the effects of light and shadow.
Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash
Experimenting with light design
In the photograph by Enrico Mantegazza above, there is a big clue to the lighting setup. The reflection in the bowl of the spoon shows three flat light sources or light reflectors. The effect created is a very diffuse canopy of light over the subject. If this was natural light, we could guess that the sun was high in the sky and the light softened by dense cloud cover.
The highlight under the bowl of the egg cup is produced by light bounced from its white foot. The darker wood in the foreground is created by placing lights so that their coverage begins to fall off in that area. With this setup, you can get a usable photograph of practically anything, although it lacks vibrancy and impact.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
Louis Hansel’s photograph above relies on a single light source from the edge of the table. Shadows are filled by incidental reflection from surrounding surfaces.
The dark background gives good visual contrast, which affects how we perceive the color tone of the eggs themselves. These are not significantly darker eggs than those in Enrico’s photograph, but they look quite different.
Should you use “Flash” in food photography?
Most food photography is low on action. If you want to freeze fast movement, then you will need to use electronic flash. Photographs like this one by Lanju Fotografie are difficult to achieve with continuous lighting.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
It’s difficult to imagine how Luke could have made a better photograph of the fruity subjects in the image above. It’s no surprise that it has been viewed many millions of times on Unsplash.
Sandy Wood
Extracting the color palette from a food photograph
Few have an innate ability to create stylish arrangements and harmonize color. The rest of us need some tools to get it right. We used TinEye to extract the color palette. The idea is to work backward to find the color palette of an existing image. We can see in the result shown above that there is an obvious connection between the colors.
Working forwards, we now know what a successful palette looks like. What’s needed is a tool that can generate a harmonious palette for the subjects we want to photograph.
Automatically create a food photography palette
Such a tool is Canva’s Color Wheel. Entering the dominant color (#9e4f5f) from Luke’s fruit photograph generates an analogous palette. We see that it is not very different from the original, confirming that the colors are harmonious.
The most practical way to use this tool is to enter your subject’s dominant color and then adjust the wheel points and color rule settings to generate a palette. It’s an approach that takes the guesswork out of harmonizing color while still allowing a huge range of possibilities.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
The benefit of being both a chef and a photographer is that you can take full credit for the photograph, including the copyright! If you are working with a chef, they need to know that style comes before taste in food photography.
Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling.
Making good food takes skill. Shooting good food takes research, planning, timing, and skill.
Style is much more difficult to define. Orson Welles said, “Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others”. Aim to introduce unique elements to your food styling, but remain aware of what your market audience expects to see.
Styling hacks are techniques that help your photographs stand out. They are the dark secrets of food photography. Fortunately, few secrets escape Google. Check out the resources at the end of this guide too.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
Here’s another great photograph by Louis Hansel. It makes you feel that you are about to be served a wonderful plate of sushi in a genuine, no-frills restaurant. Not the sort of place where diners reject food because the plate is chipped.
How to work backward to see how photographs were shot
Basic image data gives us some clues about how the image was shot. The camera is a popular entry-level DSLR from Canon, probably fitted with the 18-55mm kit lens. It has an APS-C size sensor that can capture 5148 x 3456 pixels. We can tell that the image has been cropped after it was shot because it is smaller.
The 50mm focal length used gives an angle of view of around 30 degrees, which indicates that the subject was some distance from the camera.
The main strength of this photograph lies in the use of depth of field (DOF). This refers to the point in the image where the subject is in crisp focus and the extent (or field) of that focus.
If this shot were completely in sharp focus, then the unwanted detail would detract from the subject.
Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
DOF is controlled by the aperture chosen and the focal length of the lens. The wider the aperture, the more light comes into the camera and the smaller the area of sharp focus.
In this shot the aperture was set at f/1.8, which is probably the maximum for the lens. This created a concise depth of field and allowed the maximum available light into the camera.
The shutter opened for 1/400 second, which is fast enough to avoid any blurring image caused by the subject or the camera moving.
The ISO was set to 800, a high level of sensitivity without losing too much image quality.
In short, everything worked as it should produce the desired result. Take another look at the image, and you’ll see that the area of sharp focus is well chosen.
If all of this makes your brain hurt, then the shortcut is to read your camera manual and learn by trial and error. Light your subject and take many photographs using a wide combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.
View the images on your computer using a photo editing package that can show you the exposure data. Choose the best images and start with those settings next time. Photographers call this bracketing. It’s considered as good insurance against ending up without a usable shot. Many cameras can do this automatically, particularly those with HDR capability.
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
You can shoot fantastic photographs with a smartphone, but can you reach the standard of a professional camera kit when shooting food? Let’s consider a few factors.
Optics 🙁
In Nika’s photograph above, you’ll see that the iPhone’s view of the subject is a distorted wide-angle lens image. Moving the phone further away from the subject can reduce the effect, at the cost of losing image quality. More recent models contain multiple lenses within lens bumps, offering more options. Even with these innovations, the optics are still much less capable than a budget DSLR.
Image Processing 🙂
Smartphone designers have sought to overcome the limitations of small lenses and small sensors. The need to accurately control DOF, explained in Step 7, is partially solved through software depth control. The iPhone’s image processing capabilities can produce very good results in challenging conditions, such as low light and fast-moving subjects.
Ease of use 🙂
Nothing matches the convenience of a smartphone camera. If you plan to photograph food out of the studio, the portability and speed of use can make the difference between a great shot and no shot. And they do have a built-in HDR function, which can help make up for some shortfalls.
The definitive answer to this question should be found by Googling shots of food taken with smartphone cameras. Unfortunately, many websites use DSLR images to illustrate their guides for using smartphone cameras. One notable exception is iPhone Photography School.
When you’ve done your research, let us know what you think in the comments below!
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
In this short guide, we don’t have the room to explain everything. There is more to know, but don’t let this fact stop you from getting started. There are lots of tools and resources available online to help you develop your food photography skills. Here is our shortlist… have fun!
Post Production
It’s not cheating to make post-camera changes to your images. Which of the two breakfasts in the image above looks more appealing? We think the original image (on the left) is rather too chilly. Using Gimp, the free, open-source image editing tool, we created a virtual light source in the same position as the original light source. The effect is subtle. It doesn’t change the entire image, but it does make it look like a sunnier day outside.
You aren’t stuck with your password manager. Whether you’re using LastPass, Dashlane, or another password manager, you can easily migrate your data from one to another.
Many people are considering new options, given LastPass’s recent changes, and we’re here to show you how to switch from LastPass to our preferred password manager, 1Password. See why we love 1Password and use the guide below to help you export your data from LastPass to 1Password.
Why are people leaving LastPass?
Beginning March 19, 2021, LastPass will restrict access to its free password manager for those with multiple devices. That means if you want to access all of your stored passwords on both your phone and computer, then you will no longer be able to do so.
For many, this means that they’ll simply have to upgrade to the premium version of LastPass. The premium version of LastPass will start at $36 for a year for individuals and $48 for a year for families. That’s essentially the same price as their major competitors, 1Password and Dashlane.
The only reason to stay with LastPass then is for convenience. But it’s really not that hard to switch password managers.
Do I need to manually input all my passwords again when I switch?
Nope. You can export ALL of your passwords and most of your data from LastPass to 1Password. Sometimes the way your passwords are organized may simply be a bit different, but it’s essentially the same. And we’ve written a guide to get you started with how to use 1Password—should you need any help.
Are there any cheaper options?
NordPass. We’ve reviewed NordPass favorably. NordPass costs $30 annually, compared to the $36 for 1Password or $40 for Dashlane. And it’s an excellent password manager that would be a fine replacement for LastPass. We’ve even pitted 1Password versus NordPass to compare them.
Will the steps below work for switching to other password managers?
Yes! Importing the passwords may look a bit different. But exporting your data from LastPass will be the same. And most password managers have a way to easily input your passwords into their new system. Heck, it would be silly for them NOT to make it easy for you!
You can export all of your data (passwords, secure notes, form fills, Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) as a CSV file or an XML file, which can then be easily read and moved into your new password manager, like 1Password.
Method #1: CSV export
If you have the LastPass Chrome extension installed, click on the icon and navigate to Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then the CSV will download.
Method #2: Copy and paste
There’s also an easy way to transfer the data by just copying and pasting the data from one LastPass to 1Password.
Open your internet browser and go to LastPass.com.
Sign in to your account.
In the sidebar, click Advanced Options.
Select Export.
Enter your LastPass password.
Your data will open in a new tab.
Highlight all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + A. On Windows, press ctrl + A.)
Copy all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + C. On Windows, press ctrl + C.)
Now that you have the encrypted data from LastPass in a CSV or copied to your clipboard, all you need to do is add the data into 1Password to import it.
Look for your profile picture and name in the upper-right of your account screen—and click on it.
Select Import.
Choose LastPass (or any other password manager you’re switching from).
By default, 1Password chooses your Private Vault. If you would like to import the data to a different vault, then select it. (Be careful, if you import your personal data to a shared vault, then it will be accessible to others. You can always move some passwords to your shared vault later if you wish).
For the CSV import option, click the CSV option, browse for the CSV file you exported from LastPass, and upload it. When you’re done, delete the CSV.
For the copy and paste option, Paste your data into the text field. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + V. On Windows, press ctrl + V. Or you can right-click and choose paste.)
Finally, choose Take me to my imported items to see what imported and where it imported.
A few notes on your new import from Lastpass to 1Password
What LastPass calls sites are called logins by 1Password.
“Secure Notes” will be separated into different categories in 1Password, like Bank Accounts, Driver licenses, or Secure Notes.
“Folders” become “tags.”
Your stored documents DO NOT get imported. To import those, you need to download them to your computer and store them in 1Password.
If you’re the kind of person who learns best with a video tutorial, then we’re including the official 1Password video tutorial on transferring your passwords and other data from LastPass to 1Password.
You aren’t stuck with your password manager. Whether you’re using LastPass, Dashlane, or another password manager, you can easily migrate your data from one to another.
Many people are considering new options, given LastPass’s recent changes, and we’re here to show you how to switch from LastPass to our preferred password manager, 1Password. See why we love 1Password and use the guide below to help you export your data from LastPass to 1Password.
Why are people leaving LastPass?
Beginning March 19, 2021, LastPass will restrict access to its free password manager for those with multiple devices. That means if you want to access all of your stored passwords on both your phone and computer, then you will no longer be able to do so.
For many, this means that they’ll simply have to upgrade to the premium version of LastPass. The premium version of LastPass will start at $36 for a year for individuals and $48 for a year for families. That’s essentially the same price as their major competitors, 1Password and Dashlane.
The only reason to stay with LastPass then is for convenience. But it’s really not that hard to switch password managers.
Do I need to manually input all my passwords again when I switch?
Nope. You can export ALL of your passwords and most of your data from LastPass to 1Password. Sometimes the way your passwords are organized may simply be a bit different, but it’s essentially the same. And we’ve written a guide to get you started with how to use 1Password—should you need any help.
Are there any cheaper options?
NordPass. We’ve reviewed NordPass favorably. NordPass costs $30 annually, compared to the $36 for 1Password or $40 for Dashlane. And it’s an excellent password manager that would be a fine replacement for LastPass. We’ve even pitted 1Password versus NordPass to compare them.
Will the steps below work for switching to other password managers?
Yes! Importing the passwords may look a bit different. But exporting your data from LastPass will be the same. And most password managers have a way to easily input your passwords into their new system. Heck, it would be silly for them NOT to make it easy for you!
You can export all of your data (passwords, secure notes, form fills, Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) as a CSV file or an XML file, which can then be easily read and moved into your new password manager, like 1Password.
Method #1: CSV export
If you have the LastPass Chrome extension installed, click on the icon and navigate to Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then the CSV will download.
Method #2: Copy and paste
There’s also an easy way to transfer the data by just copying and pasting the data from one LastPass to 1Password.
Open your internet browser and go to LastPass.com.
Sign in to your account.
In the sidebar, click Advanced Options.
Select Export.
Enter your LastPass password.
Your data will open in a new tab.
Highlight all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + A. On Windows, press ctrl + A.)
Copy all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + C. On Windows, press ctrl + C.)
Now that you have the encrypted data from LastPass in a CSV or copied to your clipboard, all you need to do is add the data into 1Password to import it.
Look for your profile picture and name in the upper-right of your account screen—and click on it.
Select Import.
Choose LastPass (or any other password manager you’re switching from).
By default, 1Password chooses your Private Vault. If you would like to import the data to a different vault, then select it. (Be careful, if you import your personal data to a shared vault, then it will be accessible to others. You can always move some passwords to your shared vault later if you wish).
For the CSV import option, click the CSV option, browse for the CSV file you exported from LastPass, and upload it. When you’re done, delete the CSV.
For the copy and paste option, Paste your data into the text field. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + V. On Windows, press ctrl + V. Or you can right-click and choose paste.)
Finally, choose Take me to my imported items to see what imported and where it imported.
A few notes on your new import from Lastpass to 1Password
What LastPass calls sites are called logins by 1Password.
“Secure Notes” will be separated into different categories in 1Password, like Bank Accounts, Driver licenses, or Secure Notes.
“Folders” become “tags.”
Your stored documents DO NOT get imported. To import those, you need to download them to your computer and store them in 1Password.
If you’re the kind of person who learns best with a video tutorial, then we’re including the official 1Password video tutorial on transferring your passwords and other data from LastPass to 1Password.
You aren’t stuck with your password manager. Whether you’re using LastPass, Dashlane, or another password manager, you can easily migrate your data from one to another.
Many people are considering new options, given LastPass’s recent changes, and we’re here to show you how to switch from LastPass to our preferred password manager, 1Password. See why we love 1Password and use the guide below to help you export your data from LastPass to 1Password.
Why are people leaving LastPass?
Beginning March 19, 2021, LastPass will restrict access to its free password manager for those with multiple devices. That means if you want to access all of your stored passwords on both your phone and computer, then you will no longer be able to do so.
For many, this means that they’ll simply have to upgrade to the premium version of LastPass. The premium version of LastPass will start at $36 for a year for individuals and $48 for a year for families. That’s essentially the same price as their major competitors, 1Password and Dashlane.
The only reason to stay with LastPass then is for convenience. But it’s really not that hard to switch password managers.
Do I need to manually input all my passwords again when I switch?
Nope. You can export ALL of your passwords and most of your data from LastPass to 1Password. Sometimes the way your passwords are organized may simply be a bit different, but it’s essentially the same. And we’ve written a guide to get you started with how to use 1Password—should you need any help.
Are there any cheaper options?
NordPass. We’ve reviewed NordPass favorably. NordPass costs $30 annually, compared to the $36 for 1Password or $40 for Dashlane. And it’s an excellent password manager that would be a fine replacement for LastPass. We’ve even pitted 1Password versus NordPass to compare them.
Will the steps below work for switching to other password managers?
Yes! Importing the passwords may look a bit different. But exporting your data from LastPass will be the same. And most password managers have a way to easily input your passwords into their new system. Heck, it would be silly for them NOT to make it easy for you!
You can export all of your data (passwords, secure notes, form fills, Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) as a CSV file or an XML file, which can then be easily read and moved into your new password manager, like 1Password.
Method #1: CSV export
If you have the LastPass Chrome extension installed, click on the icon and navigate to Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then the CSV will download.
Method #2: Copy and paste
There’s also an easy way to transfer the data by just copying and pasting the data from one LastPass to 1Password.
Open your internet browser and go to LastPass.com.
Sign in to your account.
In the sidebar, click Advanced Options.
Select Export.
Enter your LastPass password.
Your data will open in a new tab.
Highlight all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + A. On Windows, press ctrl + A.)
Copy all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + C. On Windows, press ctrl + C.)
Now that you have the encrypted data from LastPass in a CSV or copied to your clipboard, all you need to do is add the data into 1Password to import it.
Look for your profile picture and name in the upper-right of your account screen—and click on it.
Select Import.
Choose LastPass (or any other password manager you’re switching from).
By default, 1Password chooses your Private Vault. If you would like to import the data to a different vault, then select it. (Be careful, if you import your personal data to a shared vault, then it will be accessible to others. You can always move some passwords to your shared vault later if you wish).
For the CSV import option, click the CSV option, browse for the CSV file you exported from LastPass, and upload it. When you’re done, delete the CSV.
For the copy and paste option, Paste your data into the text field. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + V. On Windows, press ctrl + V. Or you can right-click and choose paste.)
Finally, choose Take me to my imported items to see what imported and where it imported.
A few notes on your new import from Lastpass to 1Password
What LastPass calls sites are called logins by 1Password.
“Secure Notes” will be separated into different categories in 1Password, like Bank Accounts, Driver licenses, or Secure Notes.
“Folders” become “tags.”
Your stored documents DO NOT get imported. To import those, you need to download them to your computer and store them in 1Password.
If you’re the kind of person who learns best with a video tutorial, then we’re including the official 1Password video tutorial on transferring your passwords and other data from LastPass to 1Password.
You aren’t stuck with your password manager. Whether you’re using LastPass, Dashlane, or another password manager, you can easily migrate your data from one to another.
Many people are considering new options, given LastPass’s recent changes, and we’re here to show you how to switch from LastPass to our preferred password manager, 1Password. See why we love 1Password and use the guide below to help you export your data from LastPass to 1Password.
Why are people leaving LastPass?
Beginning March 19, 2021, LastPass will restrict access to its free password manager for those with multiple devices. That means if you want to access all of your stored passwords on both your phone and computer, then you will no longer be able to do so.
For many, this means that they’ll simply have to upgrade to the premium version of LastPass. The premium version of LastPass will start at $36 for a year for individuals and $48 for a year for families. That’s essentially the same price as their major competitors, 1Password and Dashlane.
The only reason to stay with LastPass then is for convenience. But it’s really not that hard to switch password managers.
Do I need to manually input all my passwords again when I switch?
Nope. You can export ALL of your passwords and most of your data from LastPass to 1Password. Sometimes the way your passwords are organized may simply be a bit different, but it’s essentially the same. And we’ve written a guide to get you started with how to use 1Password—should you need any help.
Are there any cheaper options?
NordPass. We’ve reviewed NordPass favorably. NordPass costs $30 annually, compared to the $36 for 1Password or $40 for Dashlane. And it’s an excellent password manager that would be a fine replacement for LastPass. We’ve even pitted 1Password versus NordPass to compare them.
Will the steps below work for switching to other password managers?
Yes! Importing the passwords may look a bit different. But exporting your data from LastPass will be the same. And most password managers have a way to easily input your passwords into their new system. Heck, it would be silly for them NOT to make it easy for you!
You can export all of your data (passwords, secure notes, form fills, Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) as a CSV file or an XML file, which can then be easily read and moved into your new password manager, like 1Password.
Method #1: CSV export
If you have the LastPass Chrome extension installed, click on the icon and navigate to Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then the CSV will download.
Method #2: Copy and paste
There’s also an easy way to transfer the data by just copying and pasting the data from one LastPass to 1Password.
Open your internet browser and go to LastPass.com.
Sign in to your account.
In the sidebar, click Advanced Options.
Select Export.
Enter your LastPass password.
Your data will open in a new tab.
Highlight all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + A. On Windows, press ctrl + A.)
Copy all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + C. On Windows, press ctrl + C.)
You can export all of your data (passwords, secure notes, form fills, Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) as a CSV file or an XML file, which can then be easily read and moved into your new password manager, like 1Password.
Method #1: CSV export
If you have the LastPass Chrome extension installed, click on the icon and navigate to Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then the CSV will download.
Method #2: Copy and paste
There’s also an easy way to transfer the data by just copying and pasting the data from one LastPass to 1Password.
Open your internet browser and go to LastPass.com.
Sign in to your account.
In the sidebar, click Advanced Options.
Select Export.
Enter your LastPass password.
Your data will open in a new tab.
Highlight all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + A. On Windows, press ctrl + A.)
Copy all the onscreen text. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + C. On Windows, press ctrl + C.)
Now that you have the encrypted data from LastPass in a CSV or copied to your clipboard, all you need to do is add the data into 1Password to import it.
Look for your profile picture and name in the upper-right of your account screen—and click on it.
Select Import.
Choose LastPass (or any other password manager you’re switching from).
By default, 1Password chooses your Private Vault. If you would like to import the data to a different vault, then select it. (Be careful, if you import your personal data to a shared vault, then it will be accessible to others. You can always move some passwords to your shared vault later if you wish).
For the CSV import option, click the CSV option, browse for the CSV file you exported from LastPass, and upload it. When you’re done, delete the CSV.
For the copy and paste option, Paste your data into the text field. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + V. On Windows, press ctrl + V. Or you can right-click and choose paste.)
Finally, choose Take me to my imported items to see what imported and where it imported.
A few notes on your new import from Lastpass to 1Password
What LastPass calls sites are called logins by 1Password.
“Secure Notes” will be separated into different categories in 1Password, like Bank Accounts, Driver licenses, or Secure Notes.
“Folders” become “tags.”
Your stored documents DO NOT get imported. To import those, you need to download them to your computer and store them in 1Password.
Now that you have the encrypted data from LastPass in a CSV or copied to your clipboard, all you need to do is add the data into 1Password to import it.
Look for your profile picture and name in the upper-right of your account screen—and click on it.
Select Import.
Choose LastPass (or any other password manager you’re switching from).
By default, 1Password chooses your Private Vault. If you would like to import the data to a different vault, then select it. (Be careful, if you import your personal data to a shared vault, then it will be accessible to others. You can always move some passwords to your shared vault later if you wish).
For the CSV import option, click the CSV option, browse for the CSV file you exported from LastPass, and upload it. When you’re done, delete the CSV.
For the copy and paste option, Paste your data into the text field. (On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + V. On Windows, press ctrl + V. Or you can right-click and choose paste.)
Finally, choose Take me to my imported items to see what imported and where it imported.
A few notes on your new import from Lastpass to 1Password
What LastPass calls sites are called logins by 1Password.
“Secure Notes” will be separated into different categories in 1Password, like Bank Accounts, Driver licenses, or Secure Notes.
“Folders” become “tags.”
Your stored documents DO NOT get imported. To import those, you need to download them to your computer and store them in 1Password.
If you’re the kind of person who learns best with a video tutorial, then we’re including the official 1Password video tutorial on transferring your passwords and other data from LastPass to 1Password.
If you’re the kind of person who learns best with a video tutorial, then we’re including the official 1Password video tutorial on transferring your passwords and other data from LastPass to 1Password.
A maker at heart, Michael loves all things DIY. Michael is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor. He has published two books of poetry and has writing in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and many others. He has taught writing at colleges across the country, and managed many leading literary magazines to national prominence. Now, he’s excited to devote his energies full time to Howchoo. He currently resides in the Tampa-area with his wife and puppy.
A password manager, like 1Password or DashLand, helps you securely keep track of the passwords you use for various services and websites, making it so you only have to remember one.
A password manager, like 1Password or DashLand, helps you securely keep track of the passwords you use for various services and websites, making it so you only have to remember one.
A maker at heart, Michael loves all things DIY. Michael is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor. He has published two books of poetry and has writing in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and many others. He has taught writing at colleges across the country, and managed many leading literary magazines to national prominence. Now, he’s excited to devote his energies full time to Howchoo. He currently resides in the Tampa-area with his wife and puppy.
Zach
