Tempting food

Compared with artificial lighting, natural light is more diffuse and soft, with fewer shadows, smaller colors and fewer details, which looks the most real and natural.

Choose a window seat when eating. Glass windows can soften light to some extent. If the sun is strong, it can be further softened with thin white curtains.

When the natural light angle is very low, obvious side light and shadow may be formed. You can find a piece of white paper as a temporary reflector to fill the light.

2. Customize white balance

As we all know, cool colors are not suitable for most foods.

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Aside from the color of the food itself, the overall color of the picture will also affect the attractiveness of the food photos.

Due to the variety of lighting colors in the restaurant, the overall color of the picture will also be affected accordingly. Especially when the picture is blue and green, the food looks rotten:

Automatic white balance and preset white balance may not fully reflect the "real" color, so it is best to define the white balance with the whiteboard (or white paper) as a reference.

The specific operation is very simple, take a photo of a whiteboard (or white paper) to fill the whole picture; Then find the custom white balance option in the menu and select the white disk photo you just took.

This is equivalent to telling the camera that "in the current environment, this color is white", which can ensure that the color of the photo is closer to reality.

However, remember to reset the automatic white balance after using this function, otherwise the color of the photo will become strange in the next scene.

In addition, sometimes "untrue" is not necessarily a bad thing. According to different types and characteristics of dishes, it may also be effective to adjust different white balances to create color cast.

Generally speaking, warm food photos are more in line with people's expectations and aesthetics than cool colors. When shooting, you can try a slight warm color transfer:

3. The change of the actual situation is highlighted.

Another indispensable element of excellent food photos is the change of the picture.

If only the focal plane is parallel to the dining table, the overall picture is clear, but it is straightforward and lacks focus, and the environment is easy to appear messy:

If it's a side shot, you can get a shallow depth of field with a large aperture, and you can create a three-dimensional sense and a sense of focus by selectively expressing the key points through the change of reality and reality.

As shown in the following figure, when many identical dishes are placed side by side, it is usually best to focus on one of them:

4. Open composition

Any kind of photographer is faced with the choice of "whether to take it all" when composing. The composition form that the subject is completely integrated into the picture is called closed composition.

This form of composition is more complete in the expression of content, but the picture is easy to appear dull and dull, lacking in change:

In contrast, the composition form that only contains the main part in the picture is called open composition.

Open composition tends to enlarge and focus on the main part, which is more conducive to expressing details and gives people a fuller and fuller feeling: