Photographing What I Cook

It’s not easy to take pictures of what I cook…and that’s putting it mildly!

I’ve been a hobbyist photographer for several years, and while the experience I have does help in trying to photograph what I cook, I basically feel like I’m in new territory and that I’m out of my element. For the most part, I take pictures outdoors in natural light. I have very limited experience shooting indoors under artificial light so this makes taking pictures of food inside quite challenging.

We don’t get much natural light in our apartment because of all the shade trees. So, I tried taking my food outside on my balcony to shoot it, but the trees that block the sun, and that causes problems. Even if the sunlight was adequate, shooting on my balcony is far from ideal during winter and rainy weather.

The result is I’m learning as I go, and it’s very slow-going, challenging, and sometimes frustrating.

Kemal made me a do-it-yourself (DIY) studio light box which we place on our breakfast bar when I want to take pictures. He found a tutorial for how to make this box on strobist.com. Our apartment is very small, so this DIY studio box works well. We have fluorescent clip lights on our cabinet doors and the breakfast bar. Here’s the front view of the box.

At the time we took this picture, we used parchment paper as a stand-in to get the seamless background. Of course that paper wasn’t wide enough so we bought a roll of white all-purpose project paper which fits all the way across the width of the box.

Here’s the back view:

This is a great little set-up that works pretty well. The box is collapsible, so when we’re done shooting, we fold the box up and put it in a plastic bag under our bed. The clip lights are small so they don’t take up much storage space. Kemal is getting ready to modify the box further by cutting a square hole on the back side so we can have back lighting. The project paper that we’re using to get our seamless background will serve to diffuse the light.

Anyway, Kemal plans to write a post that will explain more about how he made the box, so I won’t go into any more details about it here.

So while this little DIY studio is great for taking pictures of finished projects, it’s not so great when I want to take pictures when I’m in the middle of cooking something. The breakfast bar where the box is sitting is also my work area when I’m cooking. It’s nearly impossible for me to use the box to photograph food in the preparation stages when I need that counter top to do my prep work.

We do have a glass coffee table in the living room that we could use to set the box on, but we can’t clip the lights to it because it’ll damage the glass. Kemal mentioned last night that we might look for a small fold-away card table that would be a good surface to put the studio box on, and we could also clip the lights to the sides of it. We won’t have any overhead light, but it might just work.

Anyway, until we get that card table, the only way I can photograph food in the prep stages is to use our little Sony pocket camera. It’s not ideal, but for now, it’ll have to do.

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to try to become better at taking pictures using artificial light, and I’m also doing a lot of reading about photographing food. I have to admit I’m disappointed in my food photos, but I hope that with practice and study, my disappointments will be fewer.

It’s a learning process, and I keep telling myself I can’t expect myself to start out taking food photos like the pros; however, I can hope for improvements and more successes along the way.