Scrolling through your Instagram and Pinterest for recipes leads to hundreds of food images. How do you stop to pick one? We choose a food image that makes our mouths water and sends our minds with sensations of already tasting, smelling, and eating the dish. The image is already filling part of its promise: a perfectly grilled maple-glazed salmon for dinner, a fluffy golden birthday cupcake. The best food photography has a story.
Storytelling in food photography starts somewhere and brings the viewer to another time and place, a memory. A recipe for goldfish crackers brings you back to days after soccer practice or bike rides to the park. Crumbles of a bitten-into cupcake is the memory of your seventh birthday party.
These photos captivate us by telling a story and tying our emotions to the story’s characters, or the food and food props. Psychologists call this state of immersion “narrative transport.”
Even if you’re not a food photographer, understanding how food is photographed will help understand your fascination with certain images and what makes a food photo good. And why you picked the recipe you did.
Stories appeal to our emotions.
Food permeates all aspects of life, including our identity and emotions. Food choices offer insights about ourselves and society. Spicy foods mean we’re adventurous. Sweets mean we’re sensitive. Meat means we’re strong. Granola means we’re outdoorsy. Birthday cake conjures childhood, parties, and nostalgia. Peanut butter promises simplicity and security.
Photos of food tug on these memories and bring to surface these vastly ranging emotions. As a photographer, you choose what memories to evoke based on your food subject and your food styling.
PROCESS shots are a storytelling device.
End shots are the most common where the recipe is completed and plated. If you can, take process shots along the way to help the viewer ‘visualize’ the recipe. Bloggers such as Ree Drummond is exceptional for the number of process shots included for every recipe. Admittedly, this is hard to do and requires more photos and time. Instead of trying to take shots of every step, focus on key moments.
Here are some key photo shots that capture the process:
- Raw ingredients-Have one photo that displays all the ingredients in the recipe. The ingredients can be displayed out of their packaging and already measured for another look. For cookies, display a bag of flour, a bottle of vanilla extract, butter still wrapped in its wax lining, and chocolate chips in its shiny package, etc. Home cooks may be curious about what type of flour and brand of chocolate you use, so be sure to include the details in the recipe if you feel like it makes a difference to the recipe.
- Transformation of ingredients– Show the steps for the cutting, dicing, blending, grating, etc. Seeing how the raw ingredients change shape and size help the viewer make the leap from the raw ingredients to its finished form.
- Cooking– Show the melting, the sauteing, the toasting, etc. Capture the steam, the sizzle, the bubbles. The viewer will be right in the kitchen with you.
- Finale– This is your hero image! Show what the finished recipe looks like. How the chocolate erupts from under the golden cookie crust, how the dough spread from a golf ball to a drink coaster, tell home cooks what to measure their own outcome to and the reward for their efforts.
We travel down the road, from the dough to the sauce to the final pizza. We see the process of ice cream sundae: scoop from carton, drizzle on sauce, then a final with scoop in bowl. We become absorbed in the story and respond emotionally to the story’s content.
Food photography takes you on a journey of senses, of memory, of taste.
The ultimate goal of food photography = Mmm, I want to eat that.
Bring closure to the viewer in your food photography. Along the way, they are building up anticipation in how the dish comes together. We want to see it finished. The photos come together, making the viewer turn into more than just that, a viewer. The viewer becomes a cook and baker too.
The finished dish gives some security and stability in an otherwise unpredictable world in seeing a gloriously cheesy tangle of noodles that has come together. Or a plate of simple yet perfectly sunny eggs on toast.
