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.

One of my favorite things about traveling (or even venturing to different neighborhoods in my own city) is the opportunity to check out new grocery stores and see how the pitch their wares. I love this window of signs, because you can tell that human energy, creativity and a strong love of cheese went into their creation.

Thanks Matthew, for adding this pic to the pool!

I'm typically too busy crying to stop and appreciate just how pretty an onion is. This amazing photo by The Barefoot Kitchen Witch makes the onion looks like a piece of crystal in a museum, the rings of a tree trunk, or a sky at sunset. Don't stop with this photo, though. To complete your onion appreciation class, be sure to view The Barefoot Kitchen Witch's other onion photos as well. Each is equally stunning and features different angles of this familiar food.

Next time I cut up an onion, I'm going to hold it under the light and take a closer look.

What does this onion look like to you? Have you stopped before to appreciate the onion's attractiveness?

The foodscapes have been coming fast and furious these past couple weeks. First I learned about London photographer Carl Warner's fanciful broccoli forests and smoked salmon seas. Then I discovered Gayle Chong Kwan's sinister Edens of rotting apples and wilted lettuce.

Now, I've been tipped off to Nicolas Lampert's meatscapes: goofy, retro photos of people with giant pieces of meat nearby. A cowboy squints into the distance from atop a mesa of honey baked ham. A family dressed in early-80's shorty-shorts poses proudly in front of a roast beef mountain.

Lampert, a Wisconsin artist, says his meatscapes are meant to make viewers think about the ethics of appropriating so much of our resources to raising animals for food.

We get our daily dose of food porn with Marisa's Food Porn Daily, but still I have to point out the photography of Rick Lee, a photographer out of Charleston, West Virginia. Rick has a blog where he showcases his photography, and because every Thursday is grocery night, there's an entire section dedicated to produce. When Rick goes, he takes incredible photos around the produce section, making basic things like corn and cabbage look positively sex-ay.

Who knew a picture of an onion could make you almost cry?

I posted about edible landscapes yesterday, in reference to Carl Warner's photographs of happy broccoli forests and nifty Parmesan cheese villages.

Well reading more, I stumbled onto a site featuring English artist Gayle Chong Kwan, essentially Warner's darker twin. Kwan also makes and photographs edible landscapes, but hers are sinister, decaying. Think shadowy jungles of rotting lettuce, desolate icy wildernesses made of butter and lard. Kwan calls the project "Cockaigne," after a mythological glutton's paradise from the 14th century, where the streets are paved with pastry and the sky rains cheese. The photographs are intended as a critique of global tourism, consumerism and the quest for utopia. Heavy stuff, and startlingly beautiful.

Broccoli forests sprouting from powdered cumin soil. A cauliflower coral reef. A pea pod boat drifting on a sunset sea of pink salmon.

London photographer Carl Warner constructs elaborate landscapes made completely of food, from mozzarella clouds to an entire village sculpted from chunks of Parmesan. There's a photo gallery of his work up on the BBC website. It looks look ultra-time consuming and amazingly cool.

We clearly have a deep-seated fascination with edible landscapes - think about the candy testing room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with its lollipop plants and chocolate river, or the lunch pail trees in Return to Oz. Or remember the town of Chewandswallow, where it rained juice and snowed mashed potatoes in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a seminal text for the (4-year old) budding foodie?

Anyway, check out the photos. They'll have you gnawing on the nearest tree limb.

Lora Zarubin's I Am Almost Always Hungry is a gorgeous book from cover to cover. I've had my copy for going on four years now and while I haven't actually made many of the recipes from the book, I love flipping through it for the section titles almost as much as the pictures (by Tess Traeger) and recipes. One of my personal favorites is the section called "I need more than comfort food tonight." The other wonderful thing about this book is that it is organized by season, which makes it an especially good resource if you are trying to eat locally and seasonally (just remember that these are the sorts of recipes that need to be read carefully before you dive in).

Oh, and a word about the photographs in this book. They are beautiful. Not just in your normal, food porn sort of way either. They are artistic and unique and I wish I had some of them framed on my walls. I particularly like the one on page 93 that is a shot of a dated handwritten recipe on a browning piece of paper.

I've always been fascinated by how other people live their food lives. This means that I really enjoy cooking with friends, love peeking at the shopping cart contents of strangers and always wanted to check out what my co-workers brought to eat for lunch. This slightly odd trait of mine is why I'm loving a recent addition to my RSS reader.

Simply Breakfast is a site that gets updated just about every weekday (and occasionally on the weekend as well) and features a single image in each post. Every day the picture is of what Jen is having for breakfast that morning. In concept it sounds sort of boring, but Jen is an artist who seems to carefully compose her meal before she snaps the shot. The result is something that is inspiring, appealing and addictive. She's got a new book out that gathers a bunch of her breakfast images together and also has an Etsy shop where you can buy prints of her photos.

Time magazine has a VERY cool slideshow up right now of famous chefs discussing the foods they'd like to eat as their last meals. Daniel Boulud would like to have whatever Alain Ducasse wanted to prepare for him. Mario Batali would like to go out in style with at least eight courses of Italian food. And Gary Danko would like something akin to a Greek or Roman banquet. All the photos and interviews are from the new book, My Last Supper, by Melanie Dunea.

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Every month, snap-happy food bloggers pile together their favorite food photos for judging in Does My Blog Look Good in This? For the month of April, Cook & Eat was the blog that hosted the "competition," and last week, with the decision of the judges, Cook & Eat announced the winners from the incredible pool of entrants. There are, as always, three regular categories - originality, edibility, and aesthetics - and this time around, they also chose a couple of photos for Best Use of Color and Best Dish Name. The overall winner for April was a Bag of Chips by Fer Food, pictured above. Head over to Cook & Eat to see the whole gorgeous gallery of photos.

About a year and a half ago, I posted about the work of photographer Michael Harlan Turkell, particularly his Back of the House Project, a great series of 25 very candid black and white photos of restaurants and their staff. Turkell recently dropped Slashfood a line, pointing out his photo blog, as well as what appears to be a new photo series called "mise en place". It had been a while since I checked Turkell's site, so the blog was news to me. It appears he's also been commissioned by New York City restaurant blog Eater to photograph the subjects of their "Gatekeepers" series, which profiles "the very folks that stand between you and some of your favorite impossible-to-get-tables." If you've ever worked in the restaurant industry, or if you're just a lover of food, dining and photography, do yourself a favor and check out Turkell's website as well as his blog.

It's hard to tell how many calories something has just by looking at it. We already know what an ounce of nuts looks like - but what do servings of other common foods look like? Wisegeek took pictures of 200 calories portions of 71 common food items, including everything from staples like flour, cornmeal, oil and butter to muffins, ketchup, bacon, Powerbars and Tootsie Pops. They every carefully cut down the items that were more than 200 calories per piece to provide the most accurate visual example possible. Measurements are given in grams or milliliters, as well as calories. And as an additional bonus, every item was shot on the same plate, bowl or glass, so the size of each item can easily be compared to its neighboring items.

Now, calories aren't the only thing to take into consideration when planning your diet, but it is still nice to see that one glazed donut doesn't have quite as many calories as a bakery muffin or a bagel because it makes it that much easier to enjoy every once in a while.

There are many food bloggers out there who take stunning, professional-quality photographs of food for their websites. There are an equal number who seem to suffer a bit from poor lighting and blurry images, though. Photographers will get better with practice, but it helps to have a good eye for composition and the ability to hold the camera steady when you're trying to take pictures - especially ones of food, which tend to be from close up and trying to capture a lot of detail. It's safe to say that there are three major elements that will really help anyone looking to improve their photography: a quality camera, good lighting and a tripod or stand,

You're on your own for the camera, but the Photo Studio in a Box offers the other two in a neat little package. It includes an adjustable camera stand, soft light box and backgrounds, two high output table-top lights (to eliminate unflattering shadows and highlight the details of your subject) and a nylon diffuser screen. It also comes with a custom carrier so you can use the studio when traveling, although restaurants probably won't be thrilled if you try to set it up on the table.

When Food & Wine announced that they were going to be hosting a food photography contest, more than a few bloggers got excited about the prospect of having their work published on the site, not to mention the fact that the first-place prize of a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT camera kit as quite appealing. The winners have been announced and it looks like the competition was stiff. First prize went to Jessica Thompson, for the photo of Papaya-Jalapeno Sorbet in Black and White Espresso Cups on the left, above. There were four first place runners up, all of whom received copies of the books of F&W's Best of the Best, Cocktails 2006 and Star Chefs on the Road. One of the four was Nika, of Nika's Culinaria, with her photo of Spice Cake with Homemade Chocolate Sauce (right).

Other food blogging participants included Christine Cassidy, Anita of Dessert First (with this photo), Adrienne of Nosheteria and Lara from Cook & Eat. It's too bad that Food & Wine didn't publish links back to blogs, if the contestants had them, but if you are one of the runners up and I missed your blog here, feel free to leave a comment and I'll add it to the list!