BackFood shot: less is more
The perfect light, the right aperture, and why chefs abhor the camera flash
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Whether a friend cooks an old family recipe, eats out at a new chic restaurant, returns to the old college samosa hang-out or simply visits a farmers’ market, we are likely to find out about it first on Facebook or Instagram. Images of food show up on our social media pages all the time. And this might be changing how we do food photography and how we plate our food. It’s something professional food photographers and chefs are thinking about too.
Perhaps that’s why an entire session was dedicated to “Nuances of Food Photography" at the IFCA Global Culinary Exchange—an annual conference of chefs—in the Capital late last year. It was led by Ragnar Fridriksson, a professional food photographer and managing director of the World Association of Chefs’ Societies. We spoke to Fridriksson to find out how to do food photography in the age of Instagram. Edited excerpts:
What advice would you give to the amateur Facebook food photographer?
Food photography is not difficult. It’s just that you have to do everything opposite of profile shooting. If I am clicking a beautiful woman, I wouldn’t want to show her wrinkles. With food, you want to show all the wrinkles, the blisters, the charring, the scales, the stringiness—all the textures—and get all the contrast. So you want the light to come from behind rather than reflected back.
The to-dos are: Have nice natural light. The light from an incandescent bulb is too warm, too red. If you have a back flash, that’s ideal. If not, use daylight—not strong daylight but daylight coming in from a window. Go closer to the food and on a level with it or shoot it from above. Set the aperture manually to 3.5-4 to get the food clearly but blur the background, so your eye travels straight to the food and not what’s happening behind it.
What never to do is use a direct flash source. That really doesn’t help anything. It flattens the colours, the textures. So that’s an absolute no-no.
What’s your food photography advice to professional chefs?
First, don’t plate too much because then the picture becomes overcrowded. So, if the steak recipe asks for five carrots, put a few shavings of carrot instead for the photo.
You might want to undercook the meat or fish a tad to keep the freshness intact for the picture.
If you want to capture movement in the kitchen, like smoke rising from a grill, manually set the camera to a slower shutter speed.
A lot of food photographers are using the blurry effect now (when part of the picture is in sharp focus and everything around it is blurred). Don’t overdo it, but it can be a good way to draw attention away from the background and focus only on the food.
What are the current trends in food photography?
If you go back a few decades, we were putting a lot of things around the plate. It was very baroque. With modern times, we want to have photos with just the food really in focus. What’s happened with digital technology is that we can play a lot more with depth of field and produce a blurry effect to attract the eye to what is to be the main attraction in the picture.
How would you describe your visual aesthetic?
For me, less is more. I really try to capture just the dish. To see the freshness of the fish, the texture. I am not so bothered about the surroundings or the table settings. For a recent picture, I asked the chef to place the food on a Plexiglass top table instead of a plate. Using some nice lights, I did the opposite of the blurry effect—I used a wide-open lens so the whole dish was very naturally displayed. There was nothing else there, just the food.
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