Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography – Part 2: Understand Your Subject
What is the first thing you need to do to take a good photograph? Check the battery? Clean the lenses? Remove the lens cap perhaps? What do you think? Answer: None of the above. The one thing that comes at the very top of the list is understanding your subject. In photography, as you may already know, subject defines everything. Depending on the subject, your camera, your lenses, your technique, the background, the lighting requirement and even your process and its elements change. Knowing and studying the subject helps defining what features make it different. So the question is, how to simplify the process of understanding the subject?
In the first post of Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography series, we discussed four phases of photographing food. In the first post Complex Art of Food Photography, we talked about four phases of photographing food. This post, explores the first phase, Understand Your Subject a little further.
Understand Your Subject
I had (and sometimes still do) this habit of jumping and grabbing the camera and starting to shoot. In my beginning years, I would take a shot here, a shot there and couple more shots and be done. I used to be so thrilled at every opportunity of taking a photo that often I forgot that I need to make a photograph and put a lot of thought behind it. Have you done something like this? And then one day I realized something. Often we forget to stop and think about what we are doing. Then I pushed myself to stop for a moment and ask myself what am I shooting? I learnt few great things about photography.
The most important thing in photography is having a subject. It is immensely important to understand your subject and what are you going to shoot. Stop and understand few things about what you are going to shoot. Know your subject, study what you want from the photograph and what you want it to look like. Focus on one aspect of the your subject and try to bring it out by photography the best you can. Here are the four steps in understanding the subject:
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First, Know Your Subject
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Study the Dish/Food You Want to Shoot
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Focus on a Feature
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Roughly Sketch the Thought
Let’s look at these four steps in more detail.
Step 1 – First, Know Your Subject
The very first thing before doing anything else is to find out what dish you are going to shoot. If you are cooking the dish and taking the photograph yourself, you would know this already (duh!), but if you are on a photo shoot where you are not cooking, identifying the dishes that need to be shot is important. The purpose here is for starting to do some research and planning to make the most out of limited time you will be with the food.
Step 2 – Study the Dish/Food You Want to Shoot
Once you know what you are going to photograph, study the dish. Observe. What is special about that dish or food? What is the food made of? If you are shooting a pasta, what kind of pasta is it? Are there any veggies in it? What are those? What are the defining elements of that dish? Pasta can be defined by the type of pasta, it can also be defined by the type of sauce or marinara. What defines your subject?
Step 3 – Focus on a Feature You Want to Show
After you have studied the food and understood what is one thing in that dish, that you would like to focus on? Is it the type of pasta in that pasta dish you plan to shoot? If you are shooting bread, is it the texture that makes the difference. If you are shooting desserts, is the color that you would want to show, or is it the shape or is it something else? After you study various features in your subject, pick a feature that you would like to show and bring out that feature in the photograph.
Step 4 – Roughly Sketch the Thought
After these mental acrobatics, we are ready to create an art. Now that you know your subject and have decided what feature you want to bring out in the photograph, we need to support that by setting up the table, props and style the food accordingly. I like to draw a rough sketch before jumping to set up the table and food and background. The purpose here is to put the idea on paper and make it visual. These sketches ( I usually end up drawing several scenarios) are by no means complete and as you start planning and setting up stage, you can make changes. The purpose is to put your thoughts on paper.
Most of the photographers go through these four steps subconsciously. At first this may seem like a lot of work, but as you practice and take more photographs, these steps will become your second nature. Once you reach that level, you will be able to see things and visualize things in your head and this level of formality may not be needed.However, if you are trying to improve your photography, this is a great exercise.
Rest of the Guide
Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography is 5 part series on improving food photography. Here are all of the parts of this guide:
- Part 1 – The Complex Art of Food Photography
- Part 2 – Understand Your Subject
- Part 3 – Plan for Making Great Photographs
- Part 4 – Set up the Stage
- Part 5 – Start Shooting
Don’t miss the remaining posts. Stay tuned. Get rest of this series by subscribing to the RSS feed or by subscribing to email updates. Yes! Its all FREE!!
Do You?
Do you think though a lot before taking a photograph? How much thought do you put into your photographs? What would you do next? Teach other readers and share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Photo Credit: Original photo Food Photography –Japanese Udon by www.hafizismail.net
Related Posts
- Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography – Part 4: Set Up the Food Photography Stage
- Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography – Part 1: The Complex Art of Photographing Food
- Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography – Part 5: Start Shooting
- Complete Guide to Mouth-Watering Food Photography – Part 3: Plan for Making Great Photographs
- Understanding Element of Arts to Improve Food Styling and Photography – Part 2: Color, Space and Texture
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I am learning a whole lot already! I’m a Foodie and homegrown cook. An opportunity for food photography just landed on my lap. Where do I find out how to be paid as a food photographer?
This is a very informative post. But there are certain things that are not easy to achieve.
For example, people tend to judge a book by its cover, which means people will also judge a food by its look.
But as any food lover will know, sometimes, the food does not look that appealing, yet it taste surprisingly great.
So how do you shoot food that looks dull but taste great? How do you bring out the ‘taste’ of the food with the photograph you take?
Any suggestion?
I recently to a picture of Chop Suey. The presentation does not look appealing. The colors were not that great except for some bright colored green and orange veggies. So I focused on the colors, I moved around the broccoli to let it stand out more than the bean sprouts. I hope this helps.
My wife’s brother is a photographer out in eastern Tennessee. His name is Eric Gebhart. He mainly does weddings though he has been branching out into other things lately. I’ll tell him about ‘food photography’ next time I see him. Thanks
When I was doing my undergraduate work I worked for a commercial photographer who specialized in food. Honestly, some of the tricks he used were pretty amazing. Believe it or not he used motor oil, A LOT, in many of the food shots. We had an actual prep kitchen with one full time food prep person to prepare and help organize the shots.
I was particularly fascinated he shot those cool images of liquid flowing out of bottle. Like those photos where it looks as though the wine is flowing straight up into the air out of the bottle. Of course the the sequence was shot upside down and then inverted for the finished delivered image. I learned a lot! And is way cool to watch this guy do his magic on foods photos.