Michael Muckian
Sometimes it’s necessary for the photographer to play wh his food.
When food is your drug of choice, making sure you can share your high with friends and family through attractive Instagram images is no small matter.
Improving food lovers’ Instagram shots is the driving force behind the Foodie Photo Lab Workshop, sponsored by Madison Originals and Metcalfe’s Market. The workshop, a blend of lecture and hands-on experience, offers roughly a dozen participants lessons in photographic composition and techniques for making their Instagram food photos more appetizing.
The most recent two-hour workshop (an earlier one in August was sponsored solely by Metcalfe’s) was held in the special events room of the restaurant Charlie’s on Main, in Oregon, Wisconsin. Metcalfe’s provided as photo fodder an array of appetizers selected for both flavor and appearance.
Attendees were diverse in their backgrounds and included a graphic designer, a dairy farmer, a food stylist, a pair of restaurateurs and a wedding cake baker. All came prepared with their cell phones to learn the ins and outs of good food shooting.
The lecturers included food photo hobbyists Mike Decello and Jordan Durst, better known online as the Midwest Munchers. They were joined by professional food photographer John Kuehl of Hankr, a website that showcases photos of food served by restaurants in Milwaukee, Madison and other cities.
“We’ve never taken a photography class or read a photography book,” Decello told attendees seated around a long table. “We just started taking photos of food with our phones and it grew from there.”
Decello and Durst’s amateur status gave them a we-did-it-and-so-can-you air the audience identified with. Kuehl’s professionalism ramped things up a notch, but his suggestions were similar to the Munchers’ guidelines.
Specific advice included:
• Shoot in natural light for convenience and to bring out the most in your food imagery. The Munchers suggest requesting a window seat and visiting the restaurant at times and on days that are not busy.
• Look for side-lighting opportunities for the best photo effects. Backlighting tends to darken the subject matter in the image by creating a too-bright backwash of light, while front-lighting can cause problems with shadows. Side-lighting also can add dimension to the subject by brightening aspects in the “structure” of the dish that otherwise might not be visible.“White light is best while yellow incandescent light can cause problems with the color temperature,” Decello says.
• Fill the frame but don’t get too close. An entrée without some type of visual context can lose its identity, sometimes creating what Decello calls an “alien landscape.”“I used to be a baker and once created some lovely, frosted beignets,” Kuehl said, displaying a slide of his work. “The photographer shot them too close and managed to make them look like raw chicken.”
• Consider the nature of the food item. Shoot flat things like pizzas and tarts from above to capture the symmetry of the design. Shoot tall things like stacked sandwiches from down low to emphasize their height and contents.
• For ordinary dishes, narrow-focusing on something like the edge of the plate or bread slice can add an intriguing dynamic.
• Action shots can be good, but by and large keep people out of the frame, since the food is the subject. And don’t bury the “hero.” If your subject is a burger, emphasize the sandwich and push the fries behind or off to the side.
• Basic foods generally look better on Instagram than fancy concoctions with hard-to-identify ingredients.
The Munchers also do a minimal amount of on-phone photo editing and recommended Gimp, Snapseed and PhotoShop Express as edit programs that are free and easy to use.
After the lecture, it was time to test our talents by photographing what was left of the Metcalfe appetizers. I tried my hand at creating a large plate with small skewers of cherry tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella and others of cantaloupe, mint leaves and prosciutto. I added two small crackers topped with sliced salmon, and a couple of cookies.
Everything looked pretty flat. Decello’s recommendation: use a smaller plate with more creatively staked skewers.
He was right.
Madison Originals hopes to offer more workshops in the future. Keep an eye on its Facebook page for announcements.
