Improve Your Food Photography

The easiest way to improve your food photography is to improve your light source.

Natural light is best, so shoot outside or near a big window whenever possible.

If you can't find enough natural light, use a desk lamp to supplement overhead lighting.

If your desk lamp is too harsh, a sheet of white paper can be held between the light source and subject to diffuse the light.

To give you a better idea of how simple lighting adjustments can drastically improve your photos, I took the same shot with 3 different lighting arrangements.

The first image was taken in my kitchen, using only existing overhead lighting.

For this image, I brought in a cheap drop lamp I got at the hardware store.

And for this image, I used a sheet of paper to diffuse the light from my lamp.

Now you've got a pretty decent photo to share.

Time to move on to editing.

By cropping and applying some subtle filters, we can take a good image and make it stand out even more.

Let's see if we can improve the photo below.

I like to use a photo editing app called Aviary.

It's easy to use and available on Android and IOS.

For this photo, I just quickly applied Aviary's 'food' filter, listed under the enhance tab.

Quite a difference, and it took about 10 seconds.

There are many photo editing apps available with countless features, but I recommend keeping it simple.

Please don't over edit images, and please avoid applying any clip art or framing to your images (sorry, I violated this suggestion with my cover photo here).

A final tip.

Take plenty of different shots at various angles.

That way, you'll increase your chances of finding a base image with a great angle and crisp focus.