This Is How You Get Fooled by the Photos in a Cookbook
Steaming stew? A juicy hamburger? Or a delicious ice cream? It all looks amazing in the photo, but food photographers have to pull out quite a few tricks to achieve that result.
Straight from the pan, onto your plate and into the photo? No, that’s not how food photography works. To take beautiful photos, a food stylist is usually brought in to arrange everything beautifully on the plate, a photographer specializing in food creates an attractive setup, and sometimes someone else is also present to make sure the right props are used: beautiful plates, bowls, cutlery, glasses and dishes.
Just like dog food
And then there’s the food: it has to look as beautiful as possible on camera, and not every dish is naturally that photogenic. A delicious juicy hamburger? If you look at it closely, it looks as if someone has sat on it. A stew? It looks just like dog food. That’s where the tricks of food photography come in handy.
Mashed potatoes
Do ice creams need to be photographed? In a photo studio, lamps are hung for the right lighting, and such a photo isn’t taken in a split second either. The result: melting ice cream. So food stylists and food photographers solve that creatively, with… mashed potatoes. Apparently, mashed potatoes have the same texture as a freshly scooped ice cream, but they don’t drip or leak. And does it need to be strawberry ice cream? Add a little food coloring, and voilà.
Baby powder
Berries, peaches and grapes that are going to be photographed are first dusted with a little baby powder. That makes them look beautifully ripe and slightly dewy—just begging to be bitten into.
Glue
Cornflakes in milk—delicious. But at home it never looks this good; it turns into a soggy mess in no time. For the photo, a whole lot of wood glue is squirted into a bowl. It looks exactly like milk, but the cornflakes and fruit stay floating on top.
Toothpicks
A hamburger like that naturally gets completely squashed. The buns sink, the pickle is no longer visible and the melted cheese drips onto your hands instead of photogenically flowing out of the side of your burger. But that doesn’t look good in a photo. To keep some space between the buns so that all the ingredients are clearly visible, toothpicks are pushed into the hamburger. It looks good, but taking a bite isn’t advisable.
Fake tan
Do you also have one of those self-tanning sprays that immediately give your legs some color? In photo studios, it’s used to fake a deliciously roasted chicken. Spray the raw chicken until it has the right brown color, and you’re done. Do you now understand why the chicken from your oven doesn’t look like that?
Layer cake
You see them struggling on Heel Holland Bakt: how do you get those layers perfectly straight? And how do you stop the whipped cream from spilling out? Don’t try this at home: the cake layers are fastened together with—toothpicks again—with pieces of cardboard in between. Add a little whipped cream from a can, or could that be shaving foam?
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Source: Why These
