Food Photography: Shooting at Restaurants

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Daniel Kriager. I'm a food photographer based here in New York City. I shoot assignments for The New York Times, magazines like Food and Wine, Bon Appetit and a restaurant website named eater.com. What we're going do today, we're going to lunch. We are here in Brooklyn at Prime Meats and I'm going to take you guys inside and what we're going to do is order some food. So, I know this might be a little bit of a weird request, but what do you think is like some of your most particularly beautiful dishes. I would say the Prime Meats burger. The Prime Meats burger. It's actually quite photogenic. The fries being slapped with blue cheese and thinker bacon on it, actually looks pretty good. I'm immediately sold on that right there. So, we're going to get one of those. Then, I'm going to talk a little bit about composition and lighting and I'm going to take you through the process of what I do to create a food photo and hopefully afterwards, you guys are going to do the same thing. I think that lunch is a really great meal to get started in food photography for a few reasons. One is that, it's an accessible meal. It's something that you can go to and not spend a ton of money. You can really experiment with different types of food because some places have sandwiches, some are doing more salads and there's a lot of variety. I think variety is great for photography. So, it's just a great meal and then on top of that one of the key elements is lighting with me and during lunch, you can really get some great natural light. So, an example of some very interesting natural light is happening right now and what's happening is there's light that's reflecting off of a building. So, it's slightly diffused and it's this clean clear light and it's bouncing through the windows and it's hitting this table. So, you can actually see these cool shadows that are being created. It's going to make the colors look really nice and it's going to give a lot of depth to whatever you're photographing. Okay. So, can we grab the tea and actually set up a quick shot. Again, what I love here is the light. I love this light. I love this shadow that's being created. It's going to bring out all the color and it's going to create more depth. So, that's one of the reasons I like shadow and I like this type of light. Cool. All right. Love that. So, this class is for professionals, it's for amateurs, it's for photo enthusiasts, people that just like to take photos of what they're eating. There's all different cuisines. There's different interiors. There's different chefs that you get to work with. Being able to have that, just variety is really cool to me and I love exploring different restaurants and looking at the way the light hits the surfaces, the way the light touches the food. It's all very interesting to me and this is one of my favorite places here. So, we're going to go inside and see what we can capture. 2. Project Assignment: So, the project here today is for you to go into a restaurant, capture a dish or two, and really present it in the best possible light, the best possible composition, and I want you to really make that image look beautiful and I want you to be excited about it when you submit it. What I'm thinking is that you do a little bit of research, find a great restaurant, maybe one you've been to and you know the light is beautiful and the food's great. Or maybe try a new place that you've never been to before, talk to the waiter and ask them what they think is beautiful. Maybe there's a special and they saw the special plated that morning and it was gorgeous, and that's what you're going to want to shoot. Maybe if you're with your friends you can have somebody pouring cup of tea, or a cup of coffee, or just holding the cup of coffee. What that does is it adds the human element to it and I think people like that. They like imagining themselves sitting on that table, eating with you and having nice conversation and sharing some delicious food. What I like to do if I'm going in as a regular patron to a restaurant, I will try to go and kind of off hours because I know there's going to be less people and I'll have a little bit more flexibility about where I'll sit and where I can stand up without drawing too much attraction to me. I don't want to disturb other diners, I don't want to disturb the wait staff or the kitchen. I tried to be as discreet as possible. So, what I'm looking for from your images is a bunch of things. I want to see that you actually put time and effort into making these photos, and I'm going to look at them, and I want to see if you are thinking about the light. If you're thinking about composition. I want you to really think that whatever you're photographing is really beautiful. If you don't want to eat it chances are no one else is going to want to either, and it might not be a great photo. So, think about all that when you're taking the pictures and feel free to just take a bunch of images and just don't limit yourself. Don't just take one image. Take multiple images and move yourself around. When we're looking at your final products, what you should do is present us with maybe one or two, couple of your best images. I don't send all my photos to my editor. You want to send your best couple that's what you want to represent your work, and let's see your best couple of images. 3. Gear & Ambience Shots: We're going to talk a little bit about the gear that I use and what type of equipment I have that I bring to a shoot. This right here is my custom made leather bag. I often get a lot of questions about it because it doesn't look like a lot of other camera bags. Several years ago, I was really searching for a cool looking camera bag. I wanted to have a leather bag and it really wasn't available, and so I went to a leather maker down in Chinatown in New York City, and we designed this together. It was pretty cool. I'm just going to show you some of the stuff that I bring to a typical shoot. So, this is an example I have, this 50-millimeter 1.4 lens. This is actually the new Sigma Art Lens. I really like this. It's super sharp, it's autofocus. Fifty millimeters, as most photographers know, is a really nice focal length, kind of it's not too close, not too far. You can shoot food with it, you can shoot portraits with it, it's a very versatile lens. Another lens I have with me today is this macro lens. This is an important lens for food photography because it allows you to get super close. I have several different macro lenses. I think my favorite is this specific model. It's a 60-millimeter 2.8 macro lens. The colors are beautiful, the sharpness is great, and it allows you to get really close to the subject which is really cool for food photography, and a lot of people want to see that. There's also this one on my camera currently which is the 35-millimeter 1.4 Nikon lens. Thirty-five millimeter's are little wider, so a lens like this, you might want to shoot when there's a big spread or there's more food on a table. You want to incorporate more things. But you can also get pretty close with this. It's not a macro lens, but it's surprising how close you can get and still focus on your subject. As far as my cameras go, I have this workforce which is a Nikon D4S. It's one the most updated, newest cameras by Nikon. It's a full-frame camera, digital. It's just really fast. It's made to last and shoot a lot. I shoot a lot. I'm doing assignments almost on a daily basis when I'm here in New York City, so I need something that's made to really work and this is a great camera. Then my other favorite camera that I use for a lot of food photography is my iPhone. This current model here is the 6+. I love the camera in the iPhone. When you get the composition, and the lighting, and the angle right, you can make a beautiful photo and it can just look really great. So, these are basically what I use to make food photographs, these couple items. It's a nice variety. We have, again, a 35-millimeter 1.4, a 50-millimeter 1.4, and then the macro which is a 60-millimeter 2.8 which allows you to get in super close. So, those three lenses really do it for me, and then on top of that, I have the iPhone. The nice thing about the iPhone for me is it's always in my pocket. So, I don't have to lug around all this stuff if I don't want to. But, when I go to a typical shoot, whether it's me taking a lunch really seriously, or doing an assignment, I will bring the setup pretty much, and I will try to use natural light and harness it the best that I can. I mean, this is just an example of something non-food, but I'm in a restaurant, and I just thought this is really cool, and I kind of really like the light on it right now. This would be an example of something I would do if I was shooting for the restaurant, and I needed to provide more than just food images. I wanted to provide atmosphere. I wanted to capture what the mood is like beyond just the food, capturing cool little things like this and they have some nice light on them, is something that I will often try to do. So, the way I'm composing it, I'm focusing in on these branches. All this other light and color and interesting stuff is going to be happening behind it, like this is my subject but within the composition, there is a lot of other elements happening in the background. When you're using a DSLR camera with a lens that you can shoot at f1.4, you're going to get this really beautiful kind of bokeh within the composition, even though, again, still this is kind of my subject matter. So, another cool thing that I like is the color of these things on a bar. There's just a lot of cool-looking things. So, I love the way that the light's hitting this right now. So, I just know that it's going to kind of come across well on the photo. This is kind of like a unique thing. You don't see these everywhere. I just know it's going to make kind of a cool shot. Say, I'm sitting at the bar, and I'm going to be looking for stuff like that. 4. Ordering: So, we're here today to talk about photographing your lunch. I think that lunch is a really great meal to get started in food photography for a few reasons. One, is that it's an accessible meal, it's something that you can go to and not spend a ton of money. You can really experiment with different types of food because some places have sandwiches, some are doing more salads. There's a lot of variety and I think variety's great for photography. So, it's just a great meal. Then on top of that one of the key elements is lighting with me. During lunch you can really get some great natural light. Natural light's something that's a big topic for me and I'm going to keep hitting on that. I think what we're going to talk about now is how to approach food photography when you enter a restaurant for lunch. Something that I do is really scan the room. I might even walk through the entire restaurant and I'll find what I think is going to provide the best light for me. Generally looking for light that is natural and soft, preferably coming in from a window, but I'm also looking for the least amount of artificial light that is going to be hitting the table or surface where I would want to photograph the food. When you walk into a restaurant, if you see a table that has this amazing window light but there's people at it, sometimes you might have to wait. They might say, "Yeah, a table's ready right here" and you'll say, "I actually really love this table, " for whatever reason. Most people don't understand it's because of the way the light's hitting the surface, the tabletop. But you can say, "I wouldn't mind waiting for that table" and so you might have to wait a little longer, but in the end it will probably benefit the final photograph that you're going to create. I'm going to walk you through how I order lunch at a restaurant, the type of things that I might say and what I'm looking for. So, let's order a little bit of food. So, I know this might be a little bit of a weird request but I like to ask the restaurant what you think is really beautiful or creative food for photography. So, off the top of your head, what stuff do you love looking at? What do you think is some of your most particularly beautiful dishes? Okay. Well, here, I would say the Primate's Burger- The Primate's Burger. - is actually quite photogenic. Okay. The fries, and then if you have a big slab of blue cheese and our thick cut bacon on it, actually looks pretty good. I'm immediately sold on that right there. So, we're going to get one of those. Normally, that would be enough for my lunch but since we're going to be taking photos of a few things, maybe a salad or something that looks nice. What do you think? I would say the bibb lettuce salad. The bibb lettuce salad? It's stacked up high in a nice little tower, it's got some radishes on it, so it's got a little color to it. Sounds perfect. So we'll get one of those too and I know this place has amazing pretzels, so we'll do a pretzel. How about one last thing? You guys have a really cool hot dog, right? Yeah. Let's do one of those hot dogs. You got it. Then a nice frosty beer to go with that. Lovely. Sound good? Okay, great. Thank you. So, that's just an example of how I would order something and what I'm looking for. I love everything that he told me and said and I'm sure it's all going to be beautiful, and we're going to find out what it looks like in a minute. Something like a hamburger's always going to be a great thing to order and photograph. Almost everyone who you know has eaten a hamburger at some point in their lives and, especially in America, it's just really like a national food I guess. So, everyone knows it, they can identify with it and they want to eat it. There's a cool symmetry to it being in a round bun and you have everything going on in between. You can shoot it bird's-eye view with the top of the bun often melted cheese and bacon over it or you can shoot it coming from it at a 90-degree angle with your camera on the table and you can see everything that's inside and like this big beautiful burger. So, that's an example of a cool thing that I might order if I see on the menu. Other things to look for with food is symmetry. Something like pizza has this beautiful symmetry to it. I tried not to get things that might be one color. If there's a pasta dish that I can just tell is just all the tones are going to be the same, there's no contrast, I might avoid that, I might skip that. But if it's a pasta dish where I know there's going to be some green thrown on it and some interesting maybe red, maybe some cherry tomatoes that are going to create contrast and use the negative space of the light-colored pasta, I'm going to be like, "That's going to look beautiful." One thing that I like to do after I order is think about what the table looks like and how to clear it. I generally want as least amount of things on the table to start with. You can always add more but when things start coming out of the kitchen, you're going to need space and you're going to need to choose the spot where you're photographing or sitting and get it as clear as possible. So, particularly if I'm on an assignment, the table that I'm going to be shooting on is almost completely clear before the first dish comes out. Then I will add things as the dish arrives and I choose where I want to photograph it on the table. So, I think here we just ordered and the next move is to start to clear the stuff and maybe just leave my camera and my phone. Now the table is cleared and we're ready to go. One of the things I do like about clearing the table is you're really paying attention to the table and what it looks like physically. When the table's covered with plates, and napkins, and glasses and menus, you don't know anything about the table and you don't really know what it looks like. When you have a clean slate, like I do right now, things start to come out a little more. So, I'm starting to see knots in this wood and I'm starting to see this beautiful texture that's on this corner. I think about the corners a little more,I think about the lines and the slants and how the table was built and the quality of it. If it's a shitty table, which this is not, this is a cool table, I'm going to maybe want to cover it up more because I don't care about the table. But if it's interesting, I'm going to want to incorporate it into my composition. I'm going to want to look at what the edge looks like or the curve if it's a round table. Does it have a line going around the edge? Is that going to create a new frame for me? So these are all things to start thinking about 5. Shooting: So, we just got some of the food here, and this cheeseburger covered with blue cheese and bacon which just looks awesome. The first thing I'm probably going to do is shoot this burger, I think it looks great. I'm just trying to find the right angle for it, and as I was saying before, I really loved the corner of this table, so I'm going to accentuate it in the image. Maybe bring in a chair too. The way I'm looking at it now is I know nobody would normally sit here right at the edge of the table, but I just like the corners and I like the way that the corner of the table cuts into the chair, the circular of the chair. What I'm going to do, I think I'm going to shoot top down, and I'm going to try to incorporate some of this chair, some of the corner of the table, and obviously, this amazing looking burger, and making sure it looks just like I like it. The light is pretty good on here right now. Some of the natural light starting to fade a little bit, but it still looks pretty cool. See here. So, and I'm shooting at F2 right now, it's that aperture priority I'm about a 50th of a second. I move everything around from the parts on the dish to where the physical camera as I want to move. I want to change it around and try different things. Because every time you move, the light is going to hit your subject differently. It's really up to you because the food is a static thing. It's not like a human being, like when you're shooting a model, the model is moving and giving you different looks and going like this, that's Joshua and Ellen and Harris does that, that's his move. This is not a human being so you have to move it. You have to keep looking at it and judging how it looks and what's the best possible photo that you're going to be able to get. So, this looks pretty cool right here. Some a little different. Try to get symmetrical as possible. I like this; this is something a little different, little interesting. Typical thing for me is to find out which pocket my phone is in after I'm done shooting with my camera. My professional camera, I bring out the iPhone. It's pretty cool. Okay. Let's move to someplace where there's better light. So, this is just a quick example of why I love natural light because of the things that it can do and the images that it can create. Example is just this spoon sitting here. If you look at this spoon, there's a bunch of cool things happening to me. One is that you have this unbelievable long beautiful shadow, but you're also getting light hitting right down here and it's popping up towards me. So, it's like this such amazing glare of light. Something like this is just great for an iPhone shot. So, I'll just grab it while still making identifiable. Most people know this as a spoon. Most people are not that interested in looking at just a spoon, but, when you can do this with the shadow, watch out how the shadow moves and how it changes just by moving it. So, you can keep playing around with that until you think it looks cool. You might be shooting for a restaurant, and the restaurant wants you to take a photo of this gorgeous looking salad which we're about to take a photo of, but if you're doing a big shoot for them, they're going to want other images, they're going to want ambiance images and kind of like establishing images. This is the type of thing that they might think is cool and they might put as a background photo. It doesn't always have to be food. So, we're taking a photo of this gorgeous bibb lettuce salad here at Primates. I love the colors of this. I love the seeds on the top and the little-shaved radishes. Then we also got this beer, because, again, we're having this amazing light that's flowing through the window right now. It just looks awesome. I wanted a light color beer because I knew I was going to get this color going. So, we might play around with this a little bit, but I definitely want that light to be heading at. A subject like this, I might want to shoot down like this to really get the height going. So, let's try one of those. Sometimes you got to get on the floor. One thing that I want to do with the spirits, I wanted to get a little more frothy so I give it a little spin, so see what happens. Sometimes you go overboard and it just gets crazy, but, you see that already looks a little bit better. So, obviously, these haven't been edited, but it looks a little abstract, the light is pretty strong, but it's cool, moody shadow, I'm digging it. So and here's one more. This is very dark in this area but you can bring that up a little bit in editing, you're getting some cool color and light, and contrast, and shadows, and all that. Just briefly, we're over there in the other room where there was actually no direct light. It was subdued, soft natural light. It was okay for food, but what I'm loving right now is we're getting this late day light hitting the food, the color is just going to pop so much more because you're getting this natural light hitting the bacon, it's hitting the tomato, the onion. What happens is it's all going to just becomes so much more vibrant. Even the ketchup. The ketchup to me does not look anything like it looked in that other room. So, I'm super excited to be shooting this right now. I have my macro lens on, so I'm going to get pretty close. Again, what I'm trying to catch here is the way the light is hitting the different food and creating this beautiful color, and it just looks awesome. So, let's see what we can get here. Yeah, you can. Thank you. Just right here would be great. Thanks so much. One thing that I really tried to incorporate in a lot of my images, specifically, on Instagram is using negative space. I love using negative space because what it does is it really draws the viewer's eye into the image and just creates this beautiful composition. We're going to look at this right now, a cocktail here at Primates, and how I would photograph it and why, I would photograph it this way and the different gradients of light that's happening. So, particularly this right now, what's happening is we're using window light, which is one of my favorite types of light. The light is coming in through the window and it's hitting this table and illuminating it. It's also hitting the cocktail and illuminating that. But the light is not really hitting down here, so it's creating this negative space, and it's going to make the cocktail pop when we take a photo of it. So, let's see what we can get here. When you shoot into the light as well, sometimes you get this really interesting light flare, maybe try moving it a little bit. Goes from this. Just flat, but still pretty, again, it's going to look nice with the negative space. But now look at what happens when it come here. Just by moving it around there's a little bit of light coming through here, direct light that's hitting that. So, let's see what this looks like. Watch what happens as we're moving, it's changing. The colors change, the light change. Now, you're getting this flare. When that flare happens, it looks crazy, it's just cool. One thing that's cool to do with cocktails is to shoot at this angle. Again, the light's coming in here, it's hitting this, it's illuminating the lemon peel, it's illuminating the color liquid in here, and then there's also all that negative space back there. It's beautiful. I like it. So, right now I'm incorporating a little bit of this table, the cocktail, the negative space in the background, the light coming in through the window. Talking about composition, I like geometry. So there's a geometry to my photography, and other peoples too. I mean people like geometry within photos. So, I'm using this as a frame. So, you're getting this really cool geometry effect. So now, here, let's do one macro photo where we get in really close and we explore the limits on the boundaries of what looks cool as a macro photo. If you're going to get too close and it's going to be too abstract, then no one will know what you're talking about. So, I want it close but not too close. I still want my viewer to be able to know what they're looking at. So, that's how I capture cocktail, and this is how I drink it, cheers. Excellent. Lots of booze. So, now, one of the last dishes we're getting is the Primates pretzel which is an amazing pretzel to get. One of the best I've ever had, I get it almost every time I'm here. But it's a cool thing to photograph and there's reasons why. What I like about it is the symmetry and the shape of it, I think it's a really cool design. I'm just going to lift it up and show you, so just look at that. Look at how cool that is. It's a unique thing, it has beautiful color on it. I like how they put the salt at the bottom and almost looks like a beard on it. I really dig that and I just know it comes across cool and photographs. They give you a little bit of butter and some mustard. It's a popular thing to photograph and it's a popular thing to eat, and those two things are my favorite. So, I'm going to try to take a couple of photos, again, we're working with like late daylight. It's starting to disappear a little bit, but we still have some minutes. As the light changes, the images change, and the way it affects your subject changes, and it creates different moods. So, it's a little moodier now, it just feels a little different than it even did 15 minutes ago, but I like it. So, right now I'm shooting with the macro again. I'm focusing on this because I think this is one of the coolest parts of the capsule. The mustard and the butter is kind of secondary, they're almost in the background and they're going to be a little blurred out. So, but you're still going to be able to tell the pretzel, which is important. Awesome. It looks great. I'm going to eat it now. 6. Final Tips: We're just going to recap and talk about a few of the things that we went through today. Basically, we started in this restaurant and the first thing we did was look around for some interesting places to set and where we're going to find some good light. Then, we went through the menu and we ordered some dishes that I thought we're going to photograph well, and I also asked the server just to to give his opinion to see what he thought like cool dishes or beautiful dishes. When we're ordering from the server, something to take into consideration is the time that things are going to come out. You should be prepared for when the food comes out of here at a restaurant, have the table set up, looking just how you want it to be and think about where you're going to be standing or sitting and taking your photo. There's other variables to think about as well. Are you ordering something hot that's going to have some steam and you're probably going to want to get that steam in the image, because that always looks cool and people love looking at steam coming off of food. When you have that steam going, it's really saying to the viewer, this is as hot as this food is going to get. So, it's enticing than it's there's something beautiful about smoke and steam. So, things like that, you really want to think about and consider. Again, looking at your table, what does it look like? If there are two tables at the restaurant, one of them has beautiful light and is an interesting looking table with all this character in it and the other one looks like it's like a replacement table. You don't want to sit at that replacement table. Choose the area that appeals to you visually and the same thing goes with food, try to choose food that's going to visually be appealing to you and to the viewer and then obviously you're going to want to eat it afterwards too. So, choose a restaurant where you like the food there. When considering composition and photography, there's more than just looking through the viewfinder and there's more than just looking on the screen on your phone. Sometimes what you need to do is step back, put your phone down, put your camera down and take in the whole composition, take in everything that's going on around you and beyond just your frame. Because what's going to happen, is you're going to catch things that you might not have seen through the lens or whether it's through your DSLR camera or your phone. There'll be things that pop up to you. You can spend your time shooting through the camera as much as you want, but every once in a while you got to stop and it's going to improve your composition, it's going to improve your photography to really look at everything surrounding and walk around it, walk around your subject and look at it from different angles. You don't have to spend a ton of time doing this, but a little bit of time is going to improve your images over all. An example of something cool that I just saw while we're sitting here talking was, this image that we're about to show you and that was in the other room. What I liked about that image is there's enough ambient light that was coming in and focusing in on the subject which was the person sitting there. There's a lot of negative space going around. But there's also some beautiful color that's going to pop up behind her. So, I thought that photo was cool and I just took it just now and that's an example of something to keep your eye out for. It doesn't always have to be food, if you're shooting in a restaurant, there might be a server that's walking by with this amazing spread of food and you might want to catch them moving to the room. So, keep your wits about you. So, one thing that I also suggest is to watch your peripherals, watch what's happening around your subject or around what you're photographing. Sometimes, I will see images that look really beautiful, but there's something coming out of a corner that you don't quite know what it is or there's a crumpled napkin that doesn't really have any place there and I don't think the photographer meant to have it in the frame. So, really scan for that, really pay attention to it. Some of that can be removed in post-processing, again using a program like Touch We Touch for your phone or a program like Photoshop on your computer. But if you can remove that before you even take the photo, you're making less work for yourself later and you're really then more focusing in on one simple beautiful composition and hopefully capturing in that way. Photographing with my iPhone is something that I do pretty regularly. A question I get a lot is how do you edit the photos? What apps do you use? Right now, Instagram has amazing built-in filters and apps to edit your images. If you want, you can really just us what they're offering right now and you'll be able to really work on your photo and create a beautiful image. Some other apps that I've been using for a few years now and I really like is VSCO, V-S-C-O, they have a free app and there's also add ons that you can purchase separately. I use a lot of those and I bought a bunch of different little filters, the new ones that come out. Also Snapseed, I believe was just a couple of dollars or it's free right now, another great really versatile app to edit your images. The thing that I like about them is it's right on your phone, it's just super easy to use, you don't need to send your photos to Photoshop on your computer, I just do it all right on my phone. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about editing images that come out of your camera as opposed to what we were just talking about before with the iPhone. What I like to do is run my images through Adobe Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom is a great program for organizing and doing some minor adjustments and minor editing to images. If something major needs to be done, you might want to open up a photo in Photoshop and you can do a little bit more advanced work on that. I will generally open up photos from a photo shoot and then I will rate them to find out which are my favorites. Everything is different, depends on the assignment. If it's just me, for a personal lunch, I might only grab the best couple. If it's an assignment I need to look specifically what does that editor need or if I'm doing a photo shoot for restaurant, I know that they have a specific shortlist. So, they're looking for certain things. So, I need to keep that in mind. So, it's a little different when you're doing something for personal and something for business. So, I will go through and I'll rate the photos and then I do, again, try to do some minor touching up, maybe playing around with the white balance, that little slider, I usually like my images a little more contrasty. I usually like to sharpen my images a bit and pump up the color. I would say that my motto is to try to edit as least as amount as possible. What I try to do is create the best possible image that I can to begin with and then enhance it from there. But I don't want to have to do too much major work to an image where it's kind of lost from that original image. So, that's one thing that I focus on for my own photography, is really getting it right, straight out of the camera or straight out of the phone, because I feel like there's only so much work you can do afterwards to make it look the way that I want it to look. Capture a dish or two and really present it in the best possible light, the best possible composition. I want you to really make that image look beautiful, and I want you to be excited about it when you submit it. 7. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare: