Like many people, we are always taking pictures of our food in restaurants and they usually turn out quite well, even though we just use our phones. Then we come home, recreate a recipe from someplace that we’ve traveled and take photos of the dish that we’ve created. We almost always dislike the pictures of our own dishes. We have read about different techniques from using a south facing window, how to plate the dish, color contrasts, etc., but still they just don’t seem to photograph well. Obviously, we don’t expect our food to necessarily look like it was prepared by a chef, we are only home-cooks and not classically trained.
We have heard that people don’t expect photographs of food to look perfect, like those from a magazine, and that a little messy can be just fine. No one has ever complained about our food pictures, other than ourselves, but we find that we are forever trying to improve at it. Maybe we are trying too hard, perhaps we should just sit down with our dinner and take a picture with our cell phone instead of taking them with our camera.
If anyone out there has some great advice, we would love to hear it. Just like we aren’t professional cooks, we also aren’t professional photographers, so if there are some simple tips, we would love to hear it. Maybe we are just being too hard on ourselves, but want to continuously improve what we do. Do any of you struggle with taking photographs of food or anything else?
