Food Photography Basics: Lighting, Backdrops and more

One of the many genres of Photography is Food Photography. Today, in this post I’ll share some basic food photography tips that can make a huge difference to your pictures.

Discover the art of food photography with this beginner-friendly guide.

We’ll cover the basics, from lighting tips to styling tricks, helping you capture delicious moments.

Whether you’re a cooking enthusiast or an aspiring influencer, this tutorial will help in making your dishes look as good as they taste!

This won’t include owning any expensive artificial lighting or softboxes. We are going to learn how to shoot food beautifully right in the comfort of our home!

Importance Of Lighting in Food Photography

First things first, I couldn’t emphasize more on the importance of lighting in Photography. This applies to all sorts of Photography and is a major major factor in taking your Food Photography game up.

I always use natural daylight when shooting at home or out in a cafe.

Irrespective of whether you’re in a cafe or your home, there’ll always be windows, right? Look for a window through which soft daylight is coming in.

Make sure the sunlight isn’t coming through the window because it will create harsh highlights and shadows that we surely don’t want.

The best kind of window is one that is in the opposite direction of the sun, that way you only get the daylight that bounces off, resulting in a perfect soft light for Food Photography.

Surface On Which You’re Shooting

Next thing, the surface. Choose the surface wisely according to the food that you’re photographing. A black or similar dark surface is versatile and works with different kinds of dishes.

The surface should complement your dish but not take away the eyes from the main subject i.e., the food itself.

For example, if the dish is quite colorful, it can be placed on a wooden-vintage kind of table but if the food is composed of only one or two colors, the wooden texture will draw more eyes than the food itself.

I love dark surfaces because the light bounces off them to the food and it looks effortless.

While shooting at home, you could move around tables, and stools that you might already have, use pastel sheets (of pastel colors only!), use a spare wooden plank lying in the store, and be creative!

Backdrops just can’t be ignored.

Also Read: How To Do Any Kind Of Color Grading In Lightroom

Types of Shots

There are 3 types of shots you can take in Food Photography: The top shot, the headshot, and the 45-degree shot.

The top shot as the name suggests, is taken from right above the plate, this is what you would call a Flatlay.

Also, Read: Tips for Flatlay Photography: LEVEL UP!

Headshot is the one you take while facing the food from the front and 45-degree is the shot you take when you’re standing up and your camera is tilted down to focus on the dish. The backdrop is seen in the top and headshots.

Keep the backdrop as clutter-free as possible. You can even create your backdrops by painting a spare piece of wooden plank. Here’s a video that will give you more ideas on how to create your backdrops:

Quick tip!

If you’re looking to seamlessly extract your subject or eliminate the background from your images, consider using Adobe’s free tool to create transparent images in a jiffy!

Hope you found this post useful. Here is my Food Photography, if you want to have a closer look-
Photographing Cupcakes!