"food photography" news and stories

• Is your meal ready for its closeup? Photographing your food is one of the odder trends of the new century.
• Induction cooking "just may be the iPad" of kitchen technology.
• Cooper Square Hotel's Faustina is the latest haunt of chef Scott Conant, "the city's most inventive practitioner of Italian-American top-dollar cooking."
• If great wines pack history in a glass, then Conterno Barolos are a survey course.
• Mark Bittman stands up for the losers -- the loser lettuces, that is.

Tomato and Olympus camera. Photo: Emily Farris.

These days, food porn seems almost to be giving the old-fashioned kind a run for its money. Everyone with a digital camera and an appetite fancies him or herself an amateur food pornographer, which is to say there's a lot of bad food photography out there alongside the good stuff.

Camera companies are catching on to the trend and trying to make a buck, with digital point and shoot models that are manufactured with food photography settings, like this Olympus which has a "cuisine" option, and this Sony, with its "gourmet food" mode. Chances are good that if you purchased a camera recently, it has some kind of food photography option and you don't even know it. If your food photographs are less than porntastic (like the tomato shot here), it might be worth your while to consult your camera's manual or look online to find out.

If you don't have a food setting, don't rush right out to buy a new camera that does.

One pro shutterbug's opinion, after the jump.

I realize that you are probably tired of eggs, being that it's just a few days after Easter and you've probably still got a dozen hardboiled hanging out in your fridge. However, if you can handle thinking about them just a little bit longer, then you've got to check out this book. It is one of the more beautiful cookbooks that has crossed my path in a long time and, even though I promised myself that I wouldn't buy any more cookbooks until I was actively using the 200 or so that I already have, I just wasn't able to resist buying Michel Roux's Eggs.

In addition to being a downright lovely book, it is also accessible and useful. It touches on every aspect of the egg, from chemistry and safety, to how to best storage your eggs and ways in which you can get the best flavor out of them. It starts with the basics of hardboiled eggs (although I'm guessing you probably already have that covered) and proceeded to walk you through some of the most glorious frittatas, omelets, mousses, custards and baked egg delights. If you often have people over for brunch, this book will help you think about using eggs in new and creative ways. I can't wait to try out some of its recipes.

Source

Food styling has always been a field that I would love to go into, but I lack the skills and have no clue how I would proceed even if I did. So instead, I just read my boyfriend's digital food photography books and think about the tricks that one might use in the profession. Sometimes I consider using them for my personal blog, but I believe it constitutes cheating. Anyway, I thought I'd share some interesting ones just in case anyone needs to make their food more beautiful (though in some cases, it will result in it being inedible!):

1) To make your coffee appear bubbly and hot, add a teaspoon of soapy water.
2) For an extra cheesy-looking slice of pizza, cook the pizza halfway, then cut out one slice and add extra cheese around the edge of the cut. Finish cooking the pizza, then photograph the extra cheesy piece as you lift it out.
3) Use food-colored mashed potatoes for ice cream. I would actually never do this because my likelihood of forgetting and eating mashed potatoes with chocolate sauce is way too high.

Any others, perhaps ones that don't render the food inedible?

In the course of writing here, I end up taking a lot of pictures of the food I cook and eat. Oftentimes I get lucky and end up with a good picture, but typically that's after taking about 17 shots from different angles. Even after all that, the results are typically mixed and the good pictures are essentially the product of dumb luck. I'm always looking for new tips to make my pictures just a little bit better.

One of my favorite food blogs out there is Still Life With... as it is a site devoted to food styling and photography. In each post, Lara walks her readers through each step she takes to capture a particular shot, including all the not-so-pretty stops along the way. I'm loving her recent post on the way she got an appealing photo of a slice of pecan pie. Pie, while delicious, is not particularly lovely on it's own and so required substantial help to get gussied up for the close-up. The final shot is gorgeous and makes me long for pie.

Oh, and if some of Lara's pictures seem familiar, it's because she's also the blogger behind the site Cook and Eat.