Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography and portraiture - How to shoot delicious food

How to shoot delicious food

First, light and shadow

There is no doubt about the role of light in photography. The most important thing is to shoot with bright light, so that the color of food can be bright and delicious.

When I photograph food, I usually photograph it in natural light. I usually shoot near the windowsill or in a bright place on the balcony. I usually use backlight or side backlight, but the light can't be too strong. It is best to have a thin screen window to block and soften the light.

When shooting indoors in the dark or at night, you don't need to use a flash, so you need lighting. Food shooting does not require high illumination. Find two desk lamps, put food in the middle, put the lamps left and right, once as the main light source, and then put a white reflector opposite the main light source. The reflector can be baked by pasting tin foil on cardboard. My department feels that there is no professional photographic equipment, so don't shoot at night.

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Second, composition

The food is placed on the table, looking for the lens angle-that is, the composition.

Composition is an important factor in photography. Generally speaking, following the principles of "less is more" and "one third", beginners are most suitable to use the principle of "less is more" and express it in a simple and clear layout, and the layout should not be too messy.

In the arrangement of composition, the rule of thirds is a very useful golden composition method, and the main body usually does not have to be placed in the center. Unless you are paranoid and insist on putting food in the middle, try different composition methods.

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Three. Tableware, tablecloth and background

The performance of the whole picture depends not only on the performance of the dishes, but also on the collocation of tableware, tablecloth and background. Don't underestimate the collocation of tableware and tablecloth. For food photography, collecting all kinds of tableware, chopsticks and tablecloths has become my great hobby. When I am away from home, others like to look at clothes, but I like to look at tableware. Pay attention to collecting some beautiful tableware and props at ordinary times. Then when shooting, I noticed that the food was in harmony with the tableware and background.

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Fourth, the shooting angle

Food shooting generally adopts aperture priority and large aperture shooting. This is because the larger the aperture of a photographic lens, the smaller the depth of field. Focusing on the subject, the scenery far away from the subject is blurred.

The shooting angles are 0, 45 and 90. I usually like to use the 45-degree Hahan method, but it's actually different. Western food, snacks, snacks, drinks, etc. They are all suitable for shooting at a relatively flat angle such as 0 to highlight their three-dimensional sense.

Some larger tableware and food can be photographed at an angle of about 90 degrees relative to the vertical.

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Fifth, the later period

Most of the films taken by SLR cameras have large gray scale and slightly small contrast. So we need retouching software in the later stage, and the specific post-processing of photos involves PhotoShop, which is a very powerful and rich graphics processing software, but we only need to learn some basic processing methods.

To take good food photos, I usually do some simple processing: curve, brightness/contrast, color scale and sharpening.