Top Chef University Blog

Food Photographers: The Unsung Kitchen Heroes

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

  

 delicious  

  

As you have read, my journey through Top Chef University so far has taught me to think more carefully about the appearance of the food I produce. As you have seen, sometimes my food photos look good, but other times they are grainy or strange-looking. So another opportunity for an educational side trek, this time with less bottles of hot sauce and without lobsters, has presented itself.

Chefs must be artists on the plate, but for now I speak of the separate, specialized art of food photography.

The two latest dishes I made were, southwest chicken salad:

…and that is the least-weird photo of MANY I took, trying to capture what it actually looked like. It looked a lot cooler in person, and it was yummy. The other dish -- beef stroganoff -- I tried as part of the sauté unit:

…and that photo looks a gargantu-illion times better. (I won’t even post that one photo I took a couple weeks ago of the flank steak with Asian marinade, which looked like something a cat coughed up, but was delicious.)

Both dishes in the above photos were of pleasant taste quality, but only one of these photos did my dish justice. So it was time to do a side search to figure out what steps I can take to make my food photography better or at least more consistent.

First, I searched “food photographers” and found some seriously amazing stuff. The site for nationally-known food photographer Michael Ray not only made me hungry, but made me realize when I saw his client list that this man has been responsible for making me hungry on a pretty regular basis. I was also dazzled by the likes of Christina Peters and Matt Armendariz.

I guess I never considered before that in the case of food, many times the still shots we see are not shot by general photographers, but by those who specialize solely in photographing food. They have to love food, but also must understand it as well as they do photography. I’d better study up a little on photography.

I found a basic tutorial about how to take better food pictures, and also an article listing some dirty tricks food photographers sometimes have to employ. All of this was eye-opening.

For instance, readers can probably look back over my photos and tell which dishes I made during the daytime (often better photos, taken in daylight, outside on my porch with the dish being held by the least clumsy child I can grab) versus indoors, at night under the fluorescent lights of my kitchen. For purposes of this project, I sometimes don’t have a choice about that because we are eating dinner at night, and well…that’s our dinner.

I tend to take several and pick the best, and doing this sometimes involves trying some with the flash on, and some with the flash off. (Yep. Mr. Miyagi. Flash on, flash off.) Sometimes the flash distorts the true color of the food and therefore the better shot is without a flash, but that shot might be too dark and need to be lightened, or, might end up blurry or grainy.

The other day, my daughter and I were bored and decided to take silly pictures of Fletcher the Beagle, with a stuffed octopus sitting on his head. Photo credit to my daughter:

Fletcher is usually a pretty sedate creature, but we had to actually work at it to get a silly (but staged) picture. The dog kept moving. The octopus kept falling off. Or I wouldn’t be quick enough getting my hand out of the shot.

Strangely, that goofy exercise was similar to food photography in that you have to be really quick about it. Some food changes color or texture quickly, or stops sizzling, or steam stops rising from it, or meat juice runs where it shouldn’t, or sauces run. I never realized how delicate an operation it can be. And judging from the dirty tricks article, sometimes you do stuff for the picture that renders the food inedible; I don’t have the luxury of using blowtorches, glue or shellac, because usually, I have to feed the food to my family. (I mean, sometimes I may fantasize about gluing a teenager's mouth shut, but I will never actually DO it.)

So with all this in mind, I’ll glean what I can from the tutorial sites, and work within my circumstances, and hope that my food photography continues to improve as my cooking is, with Top Chef University. I have saluted chefs, upon gaining a better understanding of the finer points of presentation…today I salute food photographers, who with just one click can make us want to eat, or NOT want to eat, what we see.

Next, I will continue to cook, but will not be making cole slaw. Because I won’t even eat that stuff, so I shouldn’t expect my family to. This does NOT mean I will chicken out when we get to sweetbreads. ;)

Hungrily yours,

Heidi in Pittsburgh