If your delicatessen, market, restaurant or food manufacturing company needs a food photographer, there are ways you can tell who has the necessary skills.
If you are a food producer, serve food to eat or sell it over the counter, marketing is an essential part of ensuring your company’s success. That means providing visually compelling images of the food products or dishes you sell.
To achieve this, you need a skilled food photographer to help you achieve this goal. You might decide to hire a general photographer, but unless they are a specialist who has a particular skill in making the edible look irresistible, you will be selling yourself short.
What you need to do when hiring is to understand what makes a good food photographer. An article in Table Magazine in 2023 highlighted several specific skills in interviews with five specialists in the role. One of them, Scott Goldsmith, said: “A good food photograph should evoke intrigue, curiosity, and desire.”
They agreed that you cannot just have a simple item on its own, with the article displaying photographs that demonstrate this. A top snapper will bring in the right lighting to highlight its features, use intriguing angles and add little extra features, from bites taken out of cakes to tantalisingly-placed cutlery.
Indeed, if you look at food products, often you will see them displayed alongside some of the raw ingredients included in the dish, highlighting themes of freshness and natural ingredients. This may be especially important, for example, if you have an emphasis on organic produce or a farm-to-fork approach.
There are, of course, ways anyone can take good pictures of food themselves, although when a photographer is giving you 65 tips on how to do it, that is rather a lot for an amateur to take in.
Quite simply, this is an art that takes time to perfect and if you want great pictures for your website or shop window, you can’t achieve it by trial and error. You need them from day one, especially if you have just opened.
That is why going with a pro who knows how to capture the mood, set the scene, use the right perspectives and make your food look truly delicious is the way to success.